Harm volunteers to defend a psychotic Vietnam vet accused of aiding the sleeping of a fellow V.A. patient. While Harm argues in court that Roscoe Martin withheld the victims medication as a way to free him from the trancelike state in which it left him, the prosecution claims that the lack of medication is exactly what caused the mans passing. Disappointed with the direction of the case, Roscoe feels that the cards are stacked against him and engineers an escape from the V.A. facility with three other patients. Their escape takes them to Harms apartment, and a negotiable situation turns deadly whenballoons are drawn and a SWAT team swoops in to help with what it sees as a hostage situation.
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.