The Black Tulip is what the Soviet soldiers who fought in Afghanistan called the plane that carried the bodies back to home. Opening at a Soviet army base in Kabul, the film visits an attack helicopter squadron, a firebase outside Kabul, and a guard post near Kandahar. Then the film moves to the monument to the dead of WWII beside the Kremlin wall, to a Moscow cemetery filled with dead from the Afghan war, and to the heartbreak of a mother of one of the dead soldiers.