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On Two Fronts by SGT Adam Fenner
On Two Fronts fearlessly brings the reader deep into the thoughts, emotions and experiences that are captured often just hours after occurring. Two friends share their conversations, e-mails and experiences with one another, and the reader, capturing the true essence, fears and camaraderie of a combat deployment in its entirety.On Two Fronts, Sgt. Adam Fenner and Lance Taubold are thrown into the emotional reality of coping with the upcoming deployment. Lance was living life to the fullest, a singer and entertainer, enjoying the Vegas lifestyle and the company of good friends. Then, his closest friend, Adam Fenner, a former Marine, now serving with the Nevada National Guard, was informed that he would be deploying for the third time to Afghanistan. In a story told from both Taubold’s, as he copes with Fenner’s deployment from notification until his (hopeful) return home, and Fenner’s as he faces the physical and emotional challenges of deployment and those he leaves behind.
Paperback
First published September 11, 2013
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About the author
Adam Fenner
21 books15 followersAdam Fenner is a veteran of the Marine Corps and the Army National Guard, with deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. He has written a non-fiction memoir set during a 2010 deployment to Afghanistan and is working on a fictional horror series.
More importantly, I'm a husband and a father of three, along with a very boring accountant.
More importantly, I'm a husband and a father of three, along with a very boring accountant.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 23, 2013
I read the blurb for this and thought, that is the most unique book idea I have stumbled across in a long time. A soldier on the front lines in Afghanistan and his best friend back home both writing about their individual experiences during his deployment. Adam is a soldier who actually enjoys being deployed, seems completely able to detach himself from friends, family, and home, and approaches war like it’s no big deal. Lance is the emotional, scared best friend left at home wondering if Adam is safe, what he is doing, and if he will come home.
The two writers have such different personalities. It was interesting to see steady, at-times-indifferent Adam juxtaposed against a very emotional, open Lance. For the most part, I enjoyed Adam’s account of war in Afghanistan. It is similar to other accounts I have read of what the war is really like over there. Adam is a very good writer, lots of details and descriptions that paint a picture of the base he is stationed at and the villages he patrols through. I also liked Lance’s side of things. He remains behind in Vegas and his words convey his anxiety over Adam’s safety, his relief at the sporadic emails he receives, reassuring him that Adam is alive if not always okay. The book is a study in human relationships and how war and separation change them.
And now for the but….
But if you are an animal lover and if senseless violence against animals offends you, you may not like this book.
Afghanistan has a lot of feral dogs. I know this from having read many soldiers’ books about befriending, adopting, and sometimes bringing these dogs back to the U.S. after the deployment ends. Unlike American strays, not too many people care about these dogs and many are left to fend for themselves and become very wild. I understand that they can be dangerous to soldiers and can carry diseases and that sometimes they need to be euthanized to protect people. What I don’t understand is a two-sentence account of an American soldier intentionally killing a dog that the soldiers had seemed to adopt and care for. From Adam’s very brief description, it seems like the soldier killed the dog for his own entertainment. I don’t need to launch into an explanation of how sick and wrong that is. And this incident of dog killing isn’t the only one. Adam himself tries to “euthanize” a feral dog and only manages to give it a painful bullet wound instead of killing it. These animals have terrible lives and barely manage to survive. They don’t need American soldiers killing them for sport or doing piss-poor jobs of putting them out of their misery. These incidents really pissed me off. They aren’t even a large portion of the book, but I am an animal rights advocate, so I can’t just dismiss these incidents as a part of war. I understand that is it is necessary sometimes to kill an animal for protection, but, dammit, do it correctly, quickly, and for the right reasons.
So, if you can stomach shooting dogs, this is an interesting glimpse into the lives of soldiers and the friends and family they leave behind when they are deployed.
Read this and other reviews on my blog: http://ggddizzy07.wordpress.com
The two writers have such different personalities. It was interesting to see steady, at-times-indifferent Adam juxtaposed against a very emotional, open Lance. For the most part, I enjoyed Adam’s account of war in Afghanistan. It is similar to other accounts I have read of what the war is really like over there. Adam is a very good writer, lots of details and descriptions that paint a picture of the base he is stationed at and the villages he patrols through. I also liked Lance’s side of things. He remains behind in Vegas and his words convey his anxiety over Adam’s safety, his relief at the sporadic emails he receives, reassuring him that Adam is alive if not always okay. The book is a study in human relationships and how war and separation change them.
And now for the but….
But if you are an animal lover and if senseless violence against animals offends you, you may not like this book.
Afghanistan has a lot of feral dogs. I know this from having read many soldiers’ books about befriending, adopting, and sometimes bringing these dogs back to the U.S. after the deployment ends. Unlike American strays, not too many people care about these dogs and many are left to fend for themselves and become very wild. I understand that they can be dangerous to soldiers and can carry diseases and that sometimes they need to be euthanized to protect people. What I don’t understand is a two-sentence account of an American soldier intentionally killing a dog that the soldiers had seemed to adopt and care for. From Adam’s very brief description, it seems like the soldier killed the dog for his own entertainment. I don’t need to launch into an explanation of how sick and wrong that is. And this incident of dog killing isn’t the only one. Adam himself tries to “euthanize” a feral dog and only manages to give it a painful bullet wound instead of killing it. These animals have terrible lives and barely manage to survive. They don’t need American soldiers killing them for sport or doing piss-poor jobs of putting them out of their misery. These incidents really pissed me off. They aren’t even a large portion of the book, but I am an animal rights advocate, so I can’t just dismiss these incidents as a part of war. I understand that is it is necessary sometimes to kill an animal for protection, but, dammit, do it correctly, quickly, and for the right reasons.
So, if you can stomach shooting dogs, this is an interesting glimpse into the lives of soldiers and the friends and family they leave behind when they are deployed.
Read this and other reviews on my blog: http://ggddizzy07.wordpress.com
April 19, 2014
Being a Marine Corps veteran, I am drawn to books about combat experiences and military history. I jumped at the chance to review "On Two Fronts" by Adam Fenner and Lance Taubold through NetGalley. It is an account of a combat deployment from the perspective of not just the soldier (Adam Fenner, Army National Guard) but also the best friend back home (Lance). They tackle their emotions and experiences through a back-and-forth of emails and writings in chronological order, from the moment Adam finds out his unit is being activated to his homecoming.
I wanted desperately for the focus to be the effects of the deployment not only on the servicemember but also on the loved one. Instead, Lance's writing seemed like an effort for it to be an expression of his feelings towards Adam and his unrequited love. It is force-fed to the reader constantly. What should have been a unique and needed account of the two sides to a combat deployment is overshadowed with Lance's obvious lust for and infatuation with Adam. The fit Lance throws when Adam wants to invite his girlfriend to his going-away party, his constant reference to 'Adam returning home to me', the sexual nuances...all made me raise an eyebrow after Lance revealed that he is married. I cringed at the thought of Lance's husband, Richie, reading such a public announcement of Lance's feelings for another man. At one point, Lance even confesses that he is in love with two people, Adam and Richie. Being married, I had a hard time reading this and not feeling unease.
Adam's writing teeters on the precipice of being excellent. There were parts where I thought that his writing alone would have made a great first-person account of his time overseas. As someone who has been deployed and experienced foot patrols out of remote COPs in Afghanistan, I often was taken back to the experiences, sights, and smells of a combat tour. There are moments of stark realism and unveilings of life at outposts as it truly is. He is inconsistent, though, in his mature and thought-provoking depictions, vacillating between that and the immature need to constantly remind the reader of how much he enjoys female company, or even self-enjoyment when women are not available. I wish the book spent more time on the actual deployment and time in-country, rather than so much on the time before. His accounts of his time in Afghanistan is when his writing truly shines and it seems he is much more in his element then.
I didn't care for the asides, either. One would write something and the other would jump in and make a comment on the writing. I understand where they wanted to go with that, but I think they missed the mark, especially when some of the asides were simple 'Ugh's.
In the end, I had to fight the urge to put the book down before finishing it and ended up skimming through many parts. I felt like a voyeur into a relationship that left me confused and disoriented, and one I wanted to no longer peek in on.
I wanted desperately for the focus to be the effects of the deployment not only on the servicemember but also on the loved one. Instead, Lance's writing seemed like an effort for it to be an expression of his feelings towards Adam and his unrequited love. It is force-fed to the reader constantly. What should have been a unique and needed account of the two sides to a combat deployment is overshadowed with Lance's obvious lust for and infatuation with Adam. The fit Lance throws when Adam wants to invite his girlfriend to his going-away party, his constant reference to 'Adam returning home to me', the sexual nuances...all made me raise an eyebrow after Lance revealed that he is married. I cringed at the thought of Lance's husband, Richie, reading such a public announcement of Lance's feelings for another man. At one point, Lance even confesses that he is in love with two people, Adam and Richie. Being married, I had a hard time reading this and not feeling unease.
Adam's writing teeters on the precipice of being excellent. There were parts where I thought that his writing alone would have made a great first-person account of his time overseas. As someone who has been deployed and experienced foot patrols out of remote COPs in Afghanistan, I often was taken back to the experiences, sights, and smells of a combat tour. There are moments of stark realism and unveilings of life at outposts as it truly is. He is inconsistent, though, in his mature and thought-provoking depictions, vacillating between that and the immature need to constantly remind the reader of how much he enjoys female company, or even self-enjoyment when women are not available. I wish the book spent more time on the actual deployment and time in-country, rather than so much on the time before. His accounts of his time in Afghanistan is when his writing truly shines and it seems he is much more in his element then.
I didn't care for the asides, either. One would write something and the other would jump in and make a comment on the writing. I understand where they wanted to go with that, but I think they missed the mark, especially when some of the asides were simple 'Ugh's.
In the end, I had to fight the urge to put the book down before finishing it and ended up skimming through many parts. I felt like a voyeur into a relationship that left me confused and disoriented, and one I wanted to no longer peek in on.
December 27, 2013
Two dramatically different points of view--one uniquely important book!
There are other books that tell the story of combat, this is a story of a soldier's inner journey as he transitions from home to deployment and back again. Sgt Fenner's manner of storytelling speaks volumes about the tone and nature of a soldier's life. But this is also a story about friendship that is at once unique and universal, colored by flamboyance, emotion, and quiet empathy.
I highly recommend it!
There are other books that tell the story of combat, this is a story of a soldier's inner journey as he transitions from home to deployment and back again. Sgt Fenner's manner of storytelling speaks volumes about the tone and nature of a soldier's life. But this is also a story about friendship that is at once unique and universal, colored by flamboyance, emotion, and quiet empathy.
I highly recommend it!
August 22, 2014
What a great book! Not only is it 100% the true story of Sgt Adam Fenner's deployment to Afghanistan, but it is an entertaining read as well. It had me laughing out loud occasionally, lifting my jaw off the floor over some of the antics they got up to, and my heart aching during the more serious sections of the book.
I'm not a non-fiction reader normally but I had the pleasure of meeting Adam at the Romance Novel Convention book fair and so I decided to get his book. Don't let the non-fiction aspect of this book scare you away, it reads like fiction and will definitely keep you entertained.
Entertainment aside, it was really neat to get an inside look of what it's like for the deployed and those close to the deployed.
The only reason I'm giving it 4 stars instead of 5 was that occasionally the dialogue read a little stiff. Although taken directly from real conversations, sometimes it lacked contractions and other nuances that gives dialogue a realistic flow. All-in-all a fantastic read though. It is one of those books I couldn't put down and took it with me everywhere in hopes I'd be able to get a page or two read.
I'm not a non-fiction reader normally but I had the pleasure of meeting Adam at the Romance Novel Convention book fair and so I decided to get his book. Don't let the non-fiction aspect of this book scare you away, it reads like fiction and will definitely keep you entertained.
Entertainment aside, it was really neat to get an inside look of what it's like for the deployed and those close to the deployed.
The only reason I'm giving it 4 stars instead of 5 was that occasionally the dialogue read a little stiff. Although taken directly from real conversations, sometimes it lacked contractions and other nuances that gives dialogue a realistic flow. All-in-all a fantastic read though. It is one of those books I couldn't put down and took it with me everywhere in hopes I'd be able to get a page or two read.
November 23, 2013
In the beginning Adam Fenner said he wanted to write this book to show the world that the military, the ones fighting to our rights and freedom are more then just faceless men. He did this ten fold, he gave a face to the men and women who risk their lives for us. And Lance Taubold gave a voice to their families who are left behind. This book pulled me in, it wasn't non stop action where I couldn't stop turning the pages, instead I read slowly no wanting to miss a word, wanting to understand as much a a civilian can. I loved the way they commented on each other words through out the book, it added more to seeing the true character, the personality of these men. On Two Fronts will open your eyes, it should be required reading for all Americans
Read my other reviews at www.mywanderlustreview.blogspot.com
Read my other reviews at www.mywanderlustreview.blogspot.com
November 21, 2014
I liked the photos and videos in this book. It really added a lot to it. I think this was a very emotional book between to people.One stays home and one goes to war. To be deployed is very hard. I think people that has been in a war would like to read this book. There are fun times and sad times. War is horrible.
November 27, 2013
One word, brilliant. I would recommend this book to anyone as I found it so enthralling. It gives a good insight into the real world of a soldier's life on duty and the life of those left back at home. Can not rate it high enough.
November 18, 2018
I thought the book was magnificently crafted. With two very different perspectives.Very interesting story.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews