Returning with deep psychological scars after a tour of duty in Iraq, soldier Lauren Clay guides her younger brother to an upstate New York oil field that has become the subject of her obsession and begins teaching him survival skills while revealing her experiences.

Lauren Clay returns from a tour of duty in Iraq just in time to spend the holidays with her family. She arrives home unexpectedly, and it's clear to everyone in their rural New York town that something is wrong. Her father ignores her odd behavior and the repeated phone calls from an army psychologist. Lauren offers to take her brother Danny on a trip to visit their mother upstate, but instead heads into the glacial woods of Canada on a quest to visit the Jeanne d'Arc basin, the site of an oil field that has become her strange obsession. What happened to her in Iraq that set her on this path?