The events take place in the 1980s and tell about the relationship between three generations in the family of a retired general, whose grandson, having failed to enter the institute, is drafted into the army. The service on the border does not disappoint him, and the young man decides to continue the family tradition.

Mikhail Nikolaevich Ermakov has come a long and difficult life path. At the age of nineteen, the student, the son of a worker, was sent on a Komsomol ticket to work in the Cheka. In one of the operations he was seriously wounded. And now, many years later, General Ermakov comes to Moscow and settles in the house where he spent his youth...