Honest, hard-working Texas rancher Homer Bannon has a conflict with his unscrupulous, selfish, arrogant, egotistical son Hud, who sank into alcoholism after accidentally killing his brother in a car crash.
Three World War II veterans, two of them traumatized or disabled, return home to the American midwest to discover that they and their families have been irreparably changed.
An in-depth examination of the ways in which the Vietnam War impacts and disrupts the lives of several friends in a small steel mill town in Pennsylvania.