In the eastern Slavonian town of Osijek during the Yugoslav civil war, a unit calling itself the First International Company gathers foreign volunteers to fight alongside Croatian forces. The film builds its account from interviews with the men who served, including Kit, a career soldier from north-east England who arrives in Croatia after his wife's death and finds purpose training novices in a rough boot camp before sending them on sabotage missions behind enemy lines. Command falls to Eduardo Rozsa-Flores, a Bolivian-Hungarian journalist turned soldier whose past runs through far-right nationalism and Cold War-era espionage, and who talks his way into leading men despite having little military skill himself. The film also traces the death of journalist Paul Jenks, killed while covering the same war, and uses it to press on the murkier side of Rozsa-Flores's activities. Told mostly through the volunteers' own recollections rather than narration, it stays close to their personal accounts of why they went and what the fighting cost them.