When his army unit was ambushed during the first Gulf War, Sergeant Raymond Shaw (Liev Schreiber) saved his fellow soldiers just as his commanding officer, Major Ben Marco (Denzel Washington), was knocked unconscious. Brokering the incident for political capital, Shaw eventually becomes a vice-presidential nominee, while Marco is haunted by dreams of what happened, or indeed didn't happen, in Iraq.
Searching for peace from his nightmares, Marco discovers that Shaw's story is beginning to unravel; whatever the truth, the sinister Manchurian Global Corporation is desperate to prevent him finding it...