After being stationed in a frigid, remote outpost on the Aleutian Islands for two years, US Army Sergeants Dave Stewart, a structural engineer working as a demolition expert, and "Fixit" Gilman, have three days off during the Thanksgiving weekend after arriving back in the States before needing to be on base in San Diego where they will learn of their next assignment. They will spend that time in Pasadena, Dave a 1940 graduate of Cal Tech where he plans to reconnect with his past academic life, while all Fixit can think about is finding a girl having done without for those two years. In the process, they meet friends and fellow parachute factory workers Janet Wheeler and Cora Colton. While Dave was a student, Janet worked on campus, she remembering Dave, on who she had a crush, Dave not ever noticing her in being engrossed in his studies. Dave does notice her this time as they start to fall for each other. In the Wheeler household, Dave is walking into a den of animosity: Ma can only see trouble in Janet taking up with an enlisted man, especially as he will be gone in days; Cal, Janet's brother, has a chip on his shoulders about the military in he hiding behind a medical exemption in not serving; and Janet's older sister Molly, a military wife, hasn't seen her husband Fred in two years and in her loneliness has taken up with men who pay her any attention. The only people in the house who seem to want to give Dave and Janet a chance to see if it is true love are Pop, who believes military men at least deserve some respect in their honor to country, and Janet's sixteen year old sister Ellie, a romantic at heart. Within this situation, the question becomes what Dave and Janet will do, especially as they basically see themselves as sensible people.