Twenty years after the murder of his best friend in college, a man looks back on the three terrible days in October of 1990 leading up to his death. Jonathan Tell and Ian Hope couldn't have been more different. To look at them you'd never guess they were best friends. They looked more like a hood and a bookworm. When they discover their school in Israel is sending them home because of rising tensions in the country and the looming war in the gulf, they hatch a plan with two close friends to trek from Jerusalem to a monastery in the desert in order to fulfill a promise made nearly a century earlier.