It is a murder mystery set in a segregated regiment of the U.S Army commanded by White officers and training in the Jim Crow South.

[3] In 1944 during World War II, Vernon Waters, a master sergeant in a company of Black soldiers, is shot to death with a .45 caliber pistol outside Fort Neal, a segregated Army base in Louisiana.

Private Peterson reveals Waters's tyrannical nature and his disgust with Black soldiers from the rural South who lacked education, or who spoke in Gullah language.

Interviewing other soldiers, Davenport learns that Waters charged Memphis with the murder of a White MP after a search conducted by Wilkie turned up a recently discharged pistol under his bunk.

Waters viewed "Geechees", as he termed uneducated southern Blacks like Memphis, as an obstacle to racial equality and the success of the future African American upper class.

Davenport learns that racist White officers Captain Wilcox and Lieutenant Byrd had an altercation with Waters shortly before his death.

While being interrogated by Davenport and Taylor at the officer's club, Wilcox and Byrd admit to assaulting a guilt-ridden Waters after he confronted them in a drunken tirade.

While serving with the AEF in France during World War I, a Black soldier in Waters's unit had, at the urging of racist White Doughboys, humiliated them all by dressing up and acting like a monkey in front of the French girls at a cabaret.

He confesses to watching as Peterson fatally shot Waters, claiming it was "justice" for Memphis and for all Black people.

"No one really wanted to make this movie... a black story, it was based on World War II, and those themes were not popular at the box office", according to Jewison.

Columbia's Frank Price read the screenplay and was deeply interested, but the studio was hesitant about its commercial value, so Jewison offered to do the film for a $5 million budget and no salary.

Most of the cast came from Broadway careers, but only Adolph Caesar, Denzel Washington, Larry Riley and William Allen Young appeared in both the movie and the original off-Broadway play with the Negro Ensemble Company in the New York City version.

In a 1985 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Caesar stated, while crafting the character of Waters, he drew on his frustrating experiences with both racism and ignorance in Classical theatre, "I’d studied Shakespeare to death.

The site's consensus reads, "A meticulously crafted murder mystery with incisive observations about race in America, A Soldier's Story benefits from a roundly excellent ensemble and Charles Fuller's politically urgent screenplay".