Friends are forever and family ties binding. So it would seem for Eugene Boomer, as he and his four friends, Sticks, Gracie, Fud and Pastor Jim Bob frolic through childhood and adolescence. Theirs is the silly and carefree life we wish for all our children. And if only it could prepare them for the harsher life beyond. Friends and family fall victim to the turbulence of the 60s. Boomer's relationships are battered by the choices he makes and by events he can't control, particularly the Vietnam War. Beyond middle age, he is drawn out of his self-imposed isolation and back to the gentle joys of his boyhood. Boomer is the story of a lifetime, the joys and tragedies, the things that are destroyed and the surprising ones that survive and return. Boomer is an allegory of a generation born from the euphoria of one war's end, and scarred by its bloody involvement in another.