Enemy Combatant: A Soldiers Adventure by Jeffrey Carl

Enemy Combatant: A Soldiers Adventure Reviews

• 
  Ed Morawski

  Enemy Combatant starts off with a bang and unlike some other recent books, I really looked forward to reading the rest of it. The first chapters were well written and had a lot of action. The story is set in Iraq and the author made me feel he knew a lot about the area and culture since the descriptions were believable.
  
  There was one niggling little point concerning one of the characters, Jon Bishop, that he was still only a private in the U.S. Army after five years of service. That is very unusual since the military more or less has a policy of 'up or out' - you get promoted or get out, and since an enlistment is four years he should at least been a corporal by then. But I overlooked this and went on, thinking he may have been in trouble before and busted down in rank. (This point was never resolved so I chalk it up to an error in not knowing anything about the military).
  
  Unfortunately that initial small point signals more serious flaws as the book continues. Much of the story is told in flashbacks, a perfectly acceptable method of storytelling. The first few returns to previous years were fine, but then began to be abrupt and confusing. I found myself constantly going back several pages trying to figure out what was going on, and in fact this was a rare time I wished I had a print copy. At several points I found myself questioning how certain characters could be familiar with each other (especially Bishop and Mudlarek) because of the timeline, but it got to be so much work going back and forth I tried to ignore it and moved on.
  
  About a third of the way in the story for me started slowly veering off course like a car with a sleepy driver behind the wheel. We have mysterious glowing crystals and ancient societies called Ninhursag (fact) with super power instilled by Ningalite (fiction) minerals in their blood and everything turns kind of occult. Then more errors popped up making me doubt the author knew anything about Iraq or the military - an AK47 firing .47 mm bullets, for instance. First of all the AK47 uses 7.62 mm shells - an easily discoverable fact. And simple math would tell you that .47mm is 0.0185039 inch, in other words a pinprick. Mistakes like this show a lack of research and if a minute point like this wasn't researched than what about the rest?
  
  The second half of the book almost appears as if it was written by someone else. It is full of rough dialogue and rather amateurish writing. The same words are repeated over and over in the same paragraph and even the same sentence sometimes, making it boring to read. Like 'Green Zone' - that must be repeated over a hundred times. Example: “We’re outside the Green Zone, so you take taxi into the Green Zone from here.” Abdul advised. Duh!
  
  I will complement the author on the way he eventually ties all those back stories together and interconnects the characters, but I'm not sure the arduous journey was worth the ending. I read this was a second effort of the same story and I wish the author would have used beta readers maybe. With some factual corrections and a minor rewrite to smooth the flashbacks and transitions and a good polish to eliminate repeat words, this could be a really great book.
  
• 
  Elizabeth Rose

  Enemy Combatant is best described as two books blended together. One is a military thriller of unusual depth and nuance. The other is a fantasy novel that is refreshingly not about teenage dating. Either of these premises could have yielded a book to be published on its own, but Carl shines in his ability to blend the supernatural and the mundane with rare deftness.
  The story centers around Jon Bishop, an American soldier stationed in Iraq, coming to grips with elemental powers he never knew he had while embroiled in an unsanctioned mission to keep an object of immense destructive capabilities out of the hands of a particularly ambitious terrorist. Jon is descended from a benevolent clan of occultists (the White Skulls), and is drafted into their centuries-old quest to keep a malicious clan with similar abilities (the Raven's Skull) at bay.
  It was interesting to see a glimpse of Iraq that isn't reduced to the simplistic Islam vs. the West (or Sunni vs. Shia) narrative, instead focusing on the millennia of civilization the Near East saw before the Allied invasion of 2003.
  This story is evenly paced with plenty of action. My only problems were occasional wordiness and a few niggling factual errors that I found jarring.
  I would recommend this book for anyone seeking a fun vacation read, as long as you're not too attached to Abrahamic dogma.
  
• 
  Jeffrey Carl

  
  Jeffrey Carl
  These are my author comments ENEMY COMBATANT - A Soldiers Story is the story of Jon Bishop, a US soldier who is the sole American survivor of an ambush of a security outpost in 2007. Forced into the protection of a strange family, he learns of a secret of the family with mystical roots going back thousands of years. The bombing of Baghdad in 2003 has resurfaced the secrets of this family. Now, with Jon's help, they have to fight a powerful double agent who is undermining the US and allies while trying to kill Jon and the family he has found.
  
  This is the second edition of the book, originally titled "Gliders of Enlil". Most of the story has been re-written or re-imagined with deeper characters and expanded adventures. The kindle version is available at
  http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00M8R0GQG.
  ENEMY COMBATANT - A Soldier's Story You can follow me @JeffreyCarl1 on twitter
  
• 
  Darrell Nelson

  Easy to read, tough to review:
  First off this book was a breeze to read, the pacing was great, even though it jumped around in time it was always pushing the plot forward.
  The book is set mostly in 2007 Iraq, during the war and uses both the war and the fascinating history of Iraq's place as "the cradle of civilization", as the backdrop. In the end notes Jeffrey Carl explains that this book is a rewrite of an earlier book where he feels he went into too much detail of Iraq's history. I can see how it would be an easy trap to fall into that as what he showed here was thought provoking.
  In this rewrite he stripped a lot of the rich culture and history of the region leaving just a glimpse of it. In my purely subjective view he could have added just touch more. I would be getting a little tease of the traditions and the pre-Islam religion and then he would move on. This is listed as War fiction, which is unfortunate, as a supernatural thriller it is better than most in that genre. Mostly because of how he grounded it with the real culture of the region.
  If you are looking for a good supernatural thriller, then I would recommend this book.
• 
  Samuel

  I wasn't really bothered about factual inaccuracies reported by other reviewers - they're all pretty inconsequential, especially when the story takes a turn for the weird later on. However, I would have preferred a little more description in places; I had trouble placing myself at times, and the book was a little lacking in texture overall.
  
  The dialogue is pretty natural and consistent at first, but becomes pretty sloppy in the second half, and the writing takes a dip overall; I think the second half could do with another couple of read throughs. That said, I enjoyed the flashback structure of the book, despite some rather disorientating shifts back and forth in the second half, and I did find a number of its themes and elements intriguing. Both pacing and overall length were pretty well-judged, in my opinion.
  
  I can't say I was ever truly 'gripped' by this book, but there's plenty here to enjoy for fans of Military Fiction with a hefty twist.
• 
  Gina

  I received this book as a first read. The story was interesting and it inspired me to want to learn more about Middle Eastern mythology and culture. The one big problem with this book is that the story isn't linear so the story jumps back and forth in time for no real reason. Flashbacks serve a purpose when necessary but in this case all the jumping around created chaos while disrupting the flow of the story which would've been better told in a linear fashion limited to one or two flashbacks.