 A group of American college students is sent on a State Department sponsored tour of Southeast Asia to promote the American way of life. However, the tour is beset with problems especially after one student tears down a flag from the Soviet embassy in one country and another commandeers an American television broadcast and publicly questions the tour s motives. They are then ordered to return to the United States in order to avoid further embarrassment. Unfortunately, the plane taking them back home is caught in a storm and crashes on a desert island, killing most of the adults except for one who is mortally wounded. They soon find out that the island, named Bomano, was a proposed nuclear test site complete with buildings, manequins and enough food and provisions to keep them alive. When the one adult who survived the crash dies they then decide that as long as they are on the island that they will set up their own society with their own rules and laws and try to make their world better than the one they left behind.