In her first ever teaching job, Miss Loupe uses improvisational acting exercises with her sixth-grade students at an Air Force base school, and when she experiences a family tragedy, her previously skeptical class members use what they have learned to help her, her brother, and other wounded soldiers.

When Archie Mint is killed while trying to stop a robbery in his own home, his family learns that his life, so perfect on the surface, held criminal secrets none of them could have imagined. Working on Mint's body, mortician "Zig" Zigarowski discovers a telling detail that leads him to Dover Air Force Base, where he uncovers Mint's involvement in a top-secret military unit and his connection to military artist and Sergeant First Class Nola Brown....

When her brother is sent to fight in Vietnam, twelve-year-old Jamie begins to reconsider the army world that she has grown up in.