A distressed Colonel, having gone through a divorce that will now separate him from his young son, takes his son without permission on one last hunting trip together. However, when his ex-wife notifies the police of the kidnapping, an officer is hurt while trying to apprehend the Colonel. Rabb and Austin must track down the Colonel who has been acting strangely since his son started calling him by the unknown nickname his dead childhood friend and fellow Vietnam Vet called him by. The Colonel believes that taking his son to the hunting camp he shared with his deceased buddy might reveal what his buddy wants to share with him through his son.
After being diagnosed with night blindness, Lt. Cmdr. Harmon Rabb, an F-14 Tomcat fighter pilot, is forced to change careers. Cmdr. Rabb chooses to join the Navy's Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps. There he both defends and sometimes prosecutes Navy and Marine Corps defendants. He is sometimes assisted by fellow lawyer, Lt. Sarah "Mac" MacKenzie, and his other fellow JAG staff.
Many of Rabb's cases require him to both keep up his F-14 qualifications and travel the world, in order to bring justice to the cases he is trying.
Rabb must also deal with the fact that his father, also a former Navy pilot, never returned home after being held prisoner after he was shot down in North Vietnam. Rabb believing his father is still alive continues the search he has pursued to find his father, since his teens.