Freedom Cafe

SCOTT awakes in a stateside veteran's hospital, suffering from traumatic brain injury suffered in action in Iraq. He turns his head and sees a middle-aged woman standing in the door. He stares at her in terror. Seeing his expression, she takes a step toward him and he begins screaming. She turns and flees as nurses and doctors rush toward the room to sedate the hysterical veteran. Scott is assigned to DR. GREENBERG, an army psychologist who himself is a Iraq War vet. He tries to help Scott cope with the trauma of the war but soon discovers a much greater trauma in Scott's distant childhood. Scott's father, PAUL, was a Vietnam vet, confined to a wheelchair from wartime injuries when he and Scott's mother GRACE bought a Bay Area coffee house that became one of the centers of anti-war protest toward the end of that conflict. On the day the Americans helicopters rose up from the embassy, a Bay Area policemen who was also a vet, believing Paul had betrayed their country, walked into the coffee shop and began shooting. Scott's mother Grace was killed. Paul was also shot but the most traumatic moment of the attack was when the policeman grabbed the three year old Scott and forced him to condemn his parents as traitors as his mother lay dying and his father lay in a pool of his own blood. The childhood Scott was with two friends in the coffee shop that day, BETHANIE, the woman in the hospital room door who had caused Scott to scream by reminding him of his horrible past, and AARON. The three children would spend the rest of their lives trying to deal with the trauma of that attack. Scott and Aaron would both join the service and both would experience wartime horrors of their own. Dr. Greenberg finally helps Scott confront the horrors not just of the war but of that day in the coffee shop decades before, and Scott is able to also confront Aaron about the atrocities they had witnessed and participated in during their own wars. Scott is finally freed to finally renew his relationship with his father and face the future with a new lover who opens her heart to him, wounds and all.