Guards at Guantanamo Bay are ordered to remove a detainee from his cell for interrogation. He resists, so the guards try to subdue him and end up putting him in a coma. It turns out the "detainee" was a disguised soldier and the whole thing was a training excercise. Harm is assigned to defend the guards while Mac argues that torture and excessive force are not appropriate even when dealing with terror suspects. Back in Washington, Bud and Mikey Roberts go shopping for shoes and get into a disagreement with another customer that escalates into violence.
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.