Billy Jordan returns from Viet Nam having spent two years there and in incarceration in a North Vietnamese POW camp, under torture. Back in the US, Billy is unable to adjust and eventually is released from the VA hospital in San Francisco, where he was treated for PTSS. Reverting to alcohol and drugs as a means by which he can deal with his traumas he enters various community-center rehab programs for help. There he comes under the treatment of Shaw York, a psychiatrist who uses hypnosis and subliminal suggestion to tear away the layers of denial which have been constructed by Billy to avoid some very painful memories and a significant relationship that ended in trauma. The story incorporates actual treatment session transcripts to show the process of how Billy is led back from his self-constructed prison and to the acceptance of what actually happened and WHO he really is.