Harm and Mac are assigned to prosecute three sailors charged with the vicious beating of a man they say raped a fellow shipmate. The rape victim, Petty Officer Lopez, tells Mac that, after an evening of drinking with her three male shipmates, she found herself alone at the bar where they ditched her as part of an initiation into their team. The next morning when she awakened in her car, she realized that she had been raped. When the shipmates heard Lopez's story, they exacted revenge on the man they thought attacked her - the bar owner. But as Harm and Mac wear down the testimony of the three sailors, a very different story about what happened that evening begins to emerge.
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.