When teacher Simon arrives in a small, secluded village to take over the local school, he is surprised to discover that his predecessor has disappeared without a trace - and that nobody seems too concerned about it. As Simon probes deeper into the disappearance, the inhabitants of a forbidding estate called "Summerfield" take on more and more significance.
A little girl named Cathy tries to keep her mother from making out with a man while driving one day, and she inadvertently causes her mother's death in the car crash. 16 years later, Cathy has changed her name to Helen and has become a psychotic actress. Things are going fine until horrible things starts to happened with the cast of her new play.
A group of Australian SAS regiment soldiers are deployed to Vietnam around 1967/8 and encounter the realities of war, from the numbing boredom of camp life and long range patrols, raids and ambushes where nothing happens, to the the terror of enduring mortar barrages from an unseen enemy. Men die and are crippled in combat by firefights and booby traps, soldiers kill and capture the enemy, gather intelligence and retake ground only to cede it again whilst battling against the bureaucracy and obstinacy of the conventional military hierarchy. In the end they return to civilization, forever changed by their experiences but glad to return to the life they once knew.
