Forrest (Tom Hanks)’s Timeline and Summary
- Forrest sits on a bus-stop bench and offers the woman next to him a chocolate and a bunch of memories about his childhood.
- Back when he was young, Forrest wore leg braces because his back was crooked. Between that and his IQ of 75, things looked pretty grim. His devoted momma did everything she could for him, including sleeping with his school principal to get him into the local public school.
- On his first day of school, Forrest meets Jenny Curran, and the two become best friends.
- One day, Forrest runs away from some bullies and discovers that he's actually a fantastic runner—so good that he ends up earning a football scholarship to the University of Alabama.
- Throughout college, Forrest moons over Jenny and keeps beating up her boyfriends because he thinks they're hurting her.
- After earning a college degree, Forrest enlists in the Army and goes off to fight in Vietnam. There, he promises to go into the shrimping business with his new BFF, Bubba; heroically rescues almost his entire platoon; gets shot in the butt; and discovers an innate talent for ping pong.
- Forrest's ping-pong career ends when the Army discharges him from service. He heads back to America and makes a boatload of money by endorsing a certain type of ping-pong paddle—and he uses the dough to buy an actual shrimping boat, thus keeping his promise to Bubba.
- He and another Army friend named Lt. Dan end up making tons of money in the business, and they get even richer when Dan invests their earnings in a little upstart (or startup) company called Apple Computer.
- Forrest returns home to nurse his mother while she's dying of cancer. Afterward, Jenny comes to live him with for a while, but he starts getting too clingy, and she's off again. With Jenny gone, Forrest decides to start running … and he runs … and runs. He runs so much that he actually travels across the country several times, inspiring all kinds of news stories along the way.
- When Forrest gets back, Jenny sends for him, and we come back to the present where he's waiting on the bench for a bus to her house.
- Turns out, Jenny has a little Forrest Jr.—and an "unknown" illness that is likely AIDS. She wants to marry Forrest before she dies. Better late than never?
- They marry, Jenny dies, and Forrest is left to raise their son.
- The end.