A week after watching the events of September 11, 2001, claim thousands of innocent lives, Jonathan Feldman, a twenty-three-year-old Jewish-American from Chicago’s affluent Gold Coast neighborhood, decides to join the US Army.
With no prior interest in the military, but feeling lost a year out of college, Jonathan feels compelled to be a part of something bigger than himself. Like many young soldiers at the time, he enlists with ambitions of saving the world from Muslim extremism and visions of hunting down the evil perpetrators of 9/11.
Those dreams are shattered when he is transferred to a remote base in Germany that is soon to be closing down and left forgotten by the American government. But when Jonathan’s brother and friends visit for Oktoberfest, his one-dimensional existence is changed forever.
It is at that time, when Jonathan is perfectly unprepared, that destiny brings Ela, a beautiful Turkish Muslim businesswoman from Istanbul, into his life.