One Man's Hero

The story of John Riley of Saint Patrick's Battalion, a group of Irish Catholic immigrants in the United States who desert from the Protestant-leaning U.S. Army to the mainly Catholic Mexican side during the American-Mexican War. Riley and some of the men in his battalion, fleeing to the United States from the famine caused by potato crops in their homeland, are flogged for desertion after attending a Catholic mass on Mexican soil. Feeling treated as second-class soldiers anyway, the Irish flee to Mexico to board a ship back to their Irish homeland, only to be violently captured by the revolutionary Juan Cortina as enemies of Mexico. When news arrive that the U.S. and Mexico are now at war, the Irish deserters are presented with the choice of joining and fighting on the side of the Mexican Army, thus forming their own battalion under command by Riley.