One night in 1992, Allen Schindler (Paul Popowich), a 21 year-old navy sailor serving on the USS Belleau Wood, was on shore leave in Sasebo, Japan. He was followed into a public restroom and beaten to death. While given a military funeral, it was still a full two months after his brutal murder that his mother, Dorothy Hajdys-Holman (Bonnie Bedelia), discovered that her son had been killed by two of his own shipmates. "They beat him to death." she says, "They beat him beyond recognition!" Dorothy becomes even more distraught when the representatives of the US Navy refuse to provide her with full details on her son's murder.
Then a newspaper reporter informs Dorothy that her son was gay, and that this might have been the reason he was killed. But the Navy has nothing to say about it, the entire matter will be swept under the rug, with Dorothy remaining as much in the dark as the rest of the world. A deal had already been made with one of Allen's killers, who after a secret court-martial was given what amounts to a legal slap on the wrist. Dorothy comes to grips with her own homophobia in learning to respect who her son was. Radicalized by the incident and its aftermath, she joins forces with a crusading journalist to force the Navy to reveal the whole truth--and she will not allow the court-martial of Allen's other assailant to be conducted behind closed doors. "I don't think people really know that the assailant served only 78 days, and he didn't even get a dishonorable discharge. My son signed papers saying they could give him a dishonorable discharge just because he declared he was gay," Dorothy said. "Is our country saying that it is a bigger crime to be gay than to help kill somebody?"
One of the most controversial and widely-reported true stories of the early 1990s is dramatized in this made-for-cable movie. The upshot of this high-profile case was the creation of the Service Members' Legal Defense Network, assuring that no branch of the armed services would ever again be able to conspire to cover up a major crime. Dorothy Hajdys-Holman served as the film's technical advisor, while the US Navy refused to cooperate. "I am the one who named the movie. I wanted people to realize that Allen could be any mother's son," Dorothy explained. "Any Mother's Son" made its Lifetime cable network debut on August 11, 1997. Pray for Rain composed the original music, Bruce Harmon wrote the screenplay, and David Burton Morris directed.
