On Christmas Eve, Manuela Paris returns home to a seaside town near Rome. She has been absent for some time, ever since she left - still a girl - to be a soldier. With determination and sacrifice, Manuela laboriously built the life she dreamed of, until she became an army non-commissioned officer and platoon commander in an advanced base in the Afghan desert, responsible for the life and death of thirty men. But the bloody attack in which she was seriously wounded forces her into a very differe...