Corporal James Tompkins, affectionately nicknamed Little Jim, is sent to an Air Force base in the American Southwest to recuperate after his plane was shot down by Nazis. A recluse in the Convalescent Ward of the base, Tompkins, spends most nights strumming his guitar and drinking himself to innsensibility. On one night in particular, Tompkins, drunk in the corner of the Rec Hall, is roused from his sleep by Private Jackson Laibowitz. Jackson diagnoses him as depressed. The next morning, Captain Newman enters his office and finds Tompkins there waiting. Newman asks if he wants to talk but Tompkins refuses, citing his disinterest in being filled with “flak juice”to make him talk. Expecting Tompkins to return to his office later in the night, Newman leaves the door wide open but Tompkins never appears. The next day, Tompkins visits Newman’s office and remarks that the only way he’ll talk is if the doctor joins him while he’s drunk in the Rec Hall late at night, but Newman resolves to wait out Tompkins’s games till he is “really ready” and his defenses have receded. That afternoon, Newman finds a note on his desk from Tompkins asking him to come to the Rec Hall that night. The two meet later in the night and, Tompkins, already drunk, attempts to share with the doctor his story but is interrupted by his own seething anger, at which point he surrenders to the doctor and asks for the flak juice.  The next morning, the Tompkins and Newman meet in his office. Newman administers the juice, which is really just an anesthetic, and within minutes, he begins to relive the memories of his plane being shot down by Nazis. Big Jim, the pilot to Little Jim’s gunner, who Tompkins much admired and loved, died in the flaming plane crash. Intoxicated by the flak juice, Tompkins reenacts Big Jim faintly wailing for help after the crash but is forced to run as the plane’s gas tanks ignite, as the plane explodes. Newman is greatly disturbed by the reenactment, and while he waits for Tompkins to regain consciousness, he considers the incredible expectations and burdens placed upon soldiers to perform at capacity under crisis conditions such as these, that his job is to fix him so he’d return to the battlefield to die. The next morning, Newman, beginning his authoritarian brand of therapy, reproaches Tompkins and starts to criticize him for his cowardice in not saving Big Jim. Exposing the flaw in the torturous logic of Tompkins guilt and grief, Newman goads him to the point that Tompkin recognizes that his guilt and grief, his drunken self-destruction, will not bring Big Jim back. Tompkin weeps, and for the next week Newman and Tompkins meet, each day, Newman acting out Tompkins’s “relentless conscience.” Later, Tompkins remarks to the Captain the he is ready to go back overseas and “even up the score;” ten days later he is shipped out to a base in England. 2 months later, Private Laibowitz shares with the Captain a letter saying that Tompkins had been shot down in the pyre of a Flying Fortress after leading a successful assault on Berlin and downing 2 Nazi bombers.