Jacob Gottfredson

Dancing in the Jungle Jacob Gottfredson

Publisher Marketing: Anderson is a young man born and raised in a small community in the Rocky Mountains. Just weeks before he is to be married, his fiancee gives the ring back. His life is destroyed and he begins a trek through the back doors of America's forgotten, bumming his way across the country. Finally, at his wits end, he joins the Army and becomes a US Special Forces Green Beret. He ends up training Laotian and Hmong tribesmen as commandos, accompanying them into the jungles of Laos and North Vietnam. Just days before his release from the military, he is given an order to kill another Green Beret, an acquaintance from his training days at the special warfare training center at Fort Bragg, NC. He comes to understand that it is part of an opium drug deal. He carries out the order and then begins the long journey to save his life against military personnel bent on destroying him to protect their ill gotten fortune. While in the midst of this, he meets the love of his life and must protect her from the onslaught of the major and his men who have everything to lose by allowing Anderson to stay alive. He uses his skills as a hunter and a highly trained Green Beret to prevail. The effort to destroy him takes him from the jungle of Southeast Asia to the jungle of Los Angeles and then to the mountains of home. As a part of America's secret war in Laos, Anderson is caught up in a world of lies and events that are guarded by the government and cannot be spoken of. He cannot turn to them or the police or the CIA for help. He is on his own. Alone in his struggle, he must take care of wounds himself, his own personal demons, all the while trying with everything in him to stay sane and whole against his own tortured soul and those out to destroy him. This book reveals the political and emotional problems that men deal with when America's authorities send them into harm's way. It deals with the emotions of young love and the struggle to keep it alive. Pain and sorrow and struggle are a part of the human condition. Anderson tries to prevail against them all. It is not only a struggle against his pursuers; it is often a struggle with what is real and what is not. His reality becomes a dance that is choreographed by his childhood, his education, his training, and the religion of the community of his youth.