Plot

A retired military investigator works with a police detective to uncover the truth behind his son's disappearance following his return from a tour of duty in Iraq.

In Monroe, Tennessee, Hank Deerfield, an aging warrior, gets a call that his son, just back from 18 months' fighting in Iraq, is missing from his base. Hank drives to Fort Rudd, New Mexico, to search. Within a day, the charred and dismembered body of his son is found on the outskirts of town. Deerfield pushes himself into the investigation, marked by jurisdictional antagonism between the Army and local police. Working mostly with a new detective, Emily Sanders, Hank seems to close in on what happened. Major smuggling? A drug deal gone awry? Credit card slips, some photographs, and video clips from Iraq may hold the key. If Hank gets to the truth, what will it tell him?—<jhailey@hotmail.com>

When Hank Deerfield is told by the military that his son Mike, who only recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, has gone AWOL he travels to the military base to see if he can make any sense of the young man's disappearance. Hank is himself a retired military investigator and is frustrated by both the military and the civilian police's apparent lack of interest in the case. In the end he does manage to get help from Det. Emily Sanders and together they piece together the events that led to Mike's disappearance. In the end, this is a story of how war dehumanizes individuals to the point where the taking of life makes no sense and has no purpose.—garykmcd

In 2004, in Munro, Tennessee, the former Sergeant and gravel truck hauler Hank Deerfield tries to contact his son Mike in Fort Rudd after a period serving in Iraq. However, he is informed that his son is missing in the base and has become Absent Without Official Leave (AWOL). Hank drives to the base to search his son and after an interview with the military staff, he is not convinced of the answers; then he goes to the police precinct telling that Mike is a missing person. However, the jurisdictional conflict between the Army and the police associated to a lack of interest in the case leaves Hank in limbo. Detective Emily Sanders feels sympathy for Hank and together they investigate and discover dirty little secrets with an impressive case of dehumanization caused by the invasion and consequent war in Iraq.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

On November 1, 2004, Hank Deerfield (Tommy Lee Jones) - a gravel trucker and retired military police sergeant living in Tennessee with his wife Joan (Susan Sarandon) - is notified that his son Mike (Jonathan Tucker), a soldier recently returned from Iraq, has gone missing. Hank drives to Mike's base in New Mexico to look for him; leaving home, he helps a school custodian raise the American flag correctly. At Fort Rudd after meeting Sergeant First Class Dan Carnelli (James Franco), Hank meets his son's squad (Penning, Ortiz, Long), and secretly takes Mike's cell phone from his belongings. Watching videos recovered from the phone (Hank had taken the phone to a hacker, who said that all media files were corrupted and promised to send files to Hank one by one, as he attempts to retrieve them), he attempts to report Mike's disappearance to police detective Emily Sanders (Charlize Theron), and reaches out to a friend formerly at Army CID, without success. Emily is ridiculed by her colleagues in the police department, for being a female and for having worked her way from traffic into homicide. Emily tells Hank to take the case to Military police. Hank has come to local police as he knows Military police will not be transparent about the investigation.

Mike's burned and dismembered body (with 42 stab wounds) is discovered. Fort Rudd claims jurisdiction, believing that a pipe found under Mike's mattress and the recent arrest of other soldiers for smuggling heroin indicate his murder was drug related. Hank persuades Sanders to show him the crime scene (the case belongs to the military as the murder happened on Military property) and realizes that a green car spotted at the scene was actually blue (it was standing under a yellow light and the gun store across the road reported seeing a Blue car on the night of the murder). Belittled by her male colleagues, Sanders convinces her boss Sheriff Buchwald (Josh Brolin) to pursue the investigation (since the murder took place on civil property and the body dragged to just over the boundary line), and Mike's squad mate SPC Gordon Bonner (Jake McLaughlin) reaches out to Hank.

After viewing her son's remains, Joan returns home and receives a package Mike mailed to himself, which Hank urges her not to open. Mike's credit card history leads Sanders and Hank to a restaurant, where Hank deduces Mike ate with at least two other people shortly before his death. Sanders is given sworn statements from Mike's squad by Army investigators, preventing her from interviewing them herself. Hank can sense that the army is trying to protect its own people. She invites Hank over for dinner, and he tells her young son the story of the Biblical David's battle with Goliath in the Valley of Elah.

Eve (Frances Fisher), a topless bartender Hank previously questioned, recognizes Mike's squad mate CPL Steve Penning (Wes Chatham) from a photograph, leading Hank to learn that Mike and Penning were kicked out of a strip club the night Mike was killed. Sanders interviews Penning, Bonner, and SPC Ennis Long (Mehcad Brooks), who admit to lying in their statements: after Mike got the four of them kicked out of the club, he and Bonner fought in the parking lot; Mike then paid for their food at the restaurant, and they visited a prostitute before leaving Mike, who was looking to buy drugs that night. Sanders thinks that something happened when Mike charged Bonner in the parking lot. She believes, as trained Bonner reached for his weapon and counter attacked Mike.

Hank refuses to believe Mike's fellow soldiers could be involved in his death. Brothers don't do that to each other. Army investigator First Lieutenant Kirklander (Jason Patric) produces a traffic photo of the 4 army men in a car at 12:45 am, just 15 mins before they paid for dinner at the restaurant. and the place where the body was discovered was at least 30 mins away from the location of the photo.

Hank and the police determine that another member of Mike's squad, PVT Robert Ortiz (Victor Wolf), is AWOL (every squad has 9 members and minus Mike, there should be 8 statements in the file and there are only 7), with a history of drug smuggling and a blue car. Following the police as they raid Ortiz's address, Hank subdues the fleeing Ortiz and beats him until detectives intervene. Ortiz is arrested, but there is no evidence to connect him to Mike's murder. Bonner is found hanged in his room with Mike's grandfather's watch in his pocket. Sanders concludes that Bonner, who also owned a blue car, killed Mike. She learns that Angie (Zoe Kazan), a soldier's wife who came to her for help earlier (she had said that her husband killed her dog in a fit of rage, but Sanders ignored her), has been murdered by her husband.

Hank has his son's remains sent home, and Penning helps jump-start his truck, reminiscing about Mike. Sanders matches Penning's handwriting to the signature on Mike's last credit card statement, and realizes Penning, Bonner, and Long killed Mike, then used his credit card at the restaurant. Penning has already come forward and received a plea deal from the army (with only light prison time as punishment), but at Sanders' insistence, she and Hank hear his confession in person: he admits to stabbing Mike after a seemingly insignificant quarrel. Penning stabbed and killed Mike, Bonner chopped him up. They bagged him and ate at the restaurant and them dumped and burned his body in the field, before returning to base.

Hank asks him about a video of Mike torturing a captive insurgent, and the emotionally distant Penning explains, "We all do stupid things". He also states that anyone could have died in that quarrel or a similar one, and that Mike "was the smart one [and that] he could see", thereby implying Mike may have brought the aggression upon himself out of nihilistic despondency and the realization of the group's inability to readjust to civilian life.

Collecting Mike's belongings, Hank apologizes to Ortiz, who has been honorably discharged. Haunted by his last conversation with his son, after Mike drove over an Iraqi child playing in the road, Hank thanks Sanders and returns home. He finds Joan opened Mike's package, which contains a picture of his squad and a folded flag. Returning to the local school's flagpole, Hank flies his son's flag upside down.