Behind the Badge: Joey Jones Magnifies the Voices of America’s First Responders

Photo courtesy of FOX News Books.

The worst moments of our lives are moments that first responders step into without hesitation, day after day. This relentless reality is at the heart of Johnny “Joey” Jones’s new book, Behind the Badge.

The book, which debuted at number one on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list in June, is structured as a series of chapters that each spotlight a different type of first responder. From small town firefighters, a deputy sheriff, and a state trooper to a member of the LAPD bomb squad, a U.S. Border Patrol agent, and a SWAT sniper, each first responder, a close, personal friend of Jones’s, shares their story from a first-person point of view, with Jones’s commentary and perspective layered throughout.

Jones, a retired Marine bomb technician who lost both of his legs above the knee after he stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED) in Afghanistan in 2010, is well versed in the true cost of selfless sacrifice.

The idea for Behind the Badge originated with Keith Dempsey, Jones’s brother-in-law who has served as a fireman in Dalton, Georgia for nearly three decades. When Jones was writing his first book, Unbroken Bonds of Battle, which chronicles the lives of military veterans and Gold Star wives, he would bounce ideas off of Dempsey. Dempsey then advised that a similar book could be written about first responders. The result is a collection of eye-opening first-hand accounts of what it truly means to answer the call to serve others.

“I don’t think people fully connect the fact that when there’s traffic on the interstate because of a wreck, the people that are standing out there directing traffic were just looking at someone’s mangled dead body that might look just like their wife or husband or might be somebody they knew because it’s in their community,” Jones shares.

“I don’t think the majority of people in this country know that firemen spend 80% of their time responding to medical calls. I don’t think they connect the worst days of their own lives to the trauma that those first responders are seeing over and over again, sometimes multiple times on one shift and multiple shifts in a week, multiple years in a row,” he says. “I think first response is kind of a miracle in this country because we don’t spend the money on it that we should, yet these people still show up and do it in some places for $25,000, $30,000 a year.”

Consequently, Jones hopes that his book will compel readers to have more respect for the brave men and women who tirelessly put their lives on the line to protect and serve their communities. 

“The main thing I want people to do is to read this book and, the next time they see someone in uniform or they see a red fire truck or blue lights on a police car that’s got someone pulled over on the side of the interstate, is to have a healthy amount of respect for that person for what they endure just to do that job and how much of it is oriented towards saving our lives and not hindering our lives,” Jones says.

Photo courtesy of FOX News Books.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jones’s interviewees found the book’s interview process to be therapeutic. “They were able to talk about things in ways they hadn’t talked about maybe with anyone before,” he says. “And because it wasn’t going into it saying, ‘Hey, let’s have therapy,’ it was going into it with a different mission, which was, ‘Hey, we’re going to tell these stories to help our community,’ that made them more comfortable to talk about those things,” he shares. “I think all of ‘em have some sort of anxiety of they don’t wanna sound like they’re beatin’ their own chest or callin’ themselves a hero, and I think, by the time the book was written and they got a chance to review it, they felt better about it. I think each and every one of ‘em are very proud to have been a part of it.”

Jones, who now has two New York Times bestsellers under his belt, shares that while he doesn’t currently have any plans for a third book, there are countless topics he’d love to write about. “There are issues that are really important to me,” he says. “I think fatherhood is incredibly important. I think that the culture of masculinity is really important. I think that there’s some amazing stories out there of individuals who have served in the military and gone on to do extraordinary things and being in the military played a role in that, and I would love to tell those stories.”

Jones’s own story is deeply moving and could inspire an entire book.

Jones, who was raised in Dalton, Georgia, decided to enlist in the military after high school. Although he didn’t know much about the Marine Corps at the time, he found the branch’s “you don’t have what it takes” provocation alluring and enlisted.

During his eight years of service, Jones worked a “nerdy” radio job, completed a ship tour, trained his fellow Marines on the rifle range, and guarded a nuclear submarine while its nuclear fuel was being changed out in Pearl Harbor.

Eventually, he ended up behind a .50-caliber machine gun in Iraq in 2007 providing convoy security. His team then got assigned to explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) and served as the security team that would take the EOD team out to IEDs on the road. 

“At that point in the war, IEDs were the number one weapon of the enemy, so it was a really important job to keep people alive,” Jones reflects. As he observed his fellow servicemembers disarming hidden explosives with precision, he fell in love with the art. “I loved just the fact that it had a very technical side, but it also put you in the middle of combat.”

The call to volunteer to become an EOD technician was unavoidable, so Jones submitted an application. “You have to be somewhat elite in all the ways you’re scored, and I was able to do it,” Jones shares. “They took me in, and I went to EOD school mainly based on my experiences in Iraq watching other EOD techs work, thinking that was a really cool way to serve not only my country, but other Marines.”

Jones was subsequently deployed to Afghanistan, where his EOD team destroyed nearly eighty IEDs and thousands of pounds of other unknown bulk explosives.

On August 6, 2010, during that tour, Jones stepped on and initiated an IED, which resulted in the loss of both of his legs above the knee, a nearly-severed right arm, and severe damage to both of his wrists. He was just twenty-four.

Corporal Daniel Greer, who had been providing security for Jones at the time, sustained a fatal traumatic brain injury.

In that devastating moment, Jones turned to God and asked the Marines who were with him to pray the Lord’s Prayer with him.

Jones later recovered at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington D.C. and has since worked tirelessly to improve the lives of all veterans and their families.

Last month marked the fifteen-year anniversary of Jones’s Alive Day, which he has called a day of mourning and reflection. To commemorate the day, Jones got together with three of his closest friends that were part of the same operation he was on when he was injured, as well as Greer’s wife, Stacy.

“To have the reassurance from them that the things that I did when I was [in Afghanistan] were good and positive and represented our job skills appropriately, and to see on Stacy Greer’s face the fact that she learned more about how Daniel’s sacrifice helped save lives, it really – I wouldn’t say closure ‘cuz you don’t close chapters like that – but it made me sleep better at night knowing that what we did had a net positive in a lot of ways, and to be reassured that way,” Jones reflects.

“I’m never going to feel good about Daniel losing his life, but sacrificing my legs made life better for everybody there because it helped them understand what the risks were or what the protocol needed to be. That’s war, and I feel better about it.”

While the meaning of Jones’s Alive Day has changed over time, one thing has stayed the same. “It’s always been about Daniel,” Jones says, reverently. “It’s always been about Daniel,” he repeats. “So, I’ve never celebrated it. At some point, it was pointed out to me that I needed to celebrate it because, otherwise, why did Daniel sacrifice his life if not for me to live? So, over the years, it’s become an opportunity for me to reflect on did I do the things this last year that I should’ve done the way they should’ve been done? Did I do more for people? Did I make what I call my bonus years matter? I look at it like I should’ve died on August 6, 2010, so every year I live after that is a bonus year, and, if you’re gonna get a bonus, you need to spend it wisely. Over the years, I’ve learned to feel a greater sense of gratitude and less sense of remorse or guilt because I can look back and say, ‘Hey, this year I was able to do more for other people.’”

Today, Jones splits his time between his Georgia farm and New York City, where he appears regularly on Fox News and Fox Nation, translating his battlefield experiences and the life lessons he’s learned into stories that resonate with viewers across the country.

Back home on the farm, Jones and his family tend to goats, grow hay, and master target shooting on their sporting clay range. “There’s always work that needs to be done, but it’s reassuring, gratifying work you do with your hands, and that’s what I wanted out of it,” Jones shares of life on the farm.

“That’s what’s most important to me is when I wake up in the morning, I can see the sunrise, and I can see the sunset without a building in sight. I can have a hundred geese that’ll land either on my pond or in my back field about eight months a year, and I can get in touch with how amazing God and this life is. I can watch wild animals and how a hundred geese can come in and do the same thing independently and all together and make it work. I can watch deer run across the back field and a baby goat with its mama. A couple times a year, we’ll have a bunch of skunks pop up with their babies, and, as long as you don’t get too close to ‘em, they’re pretty to see. And to know that sometimes, I’m gonna be five minutes late ‘cuz I’m stuck behind a tractor and there’s not a thing in the world wrong with that. Life here allows the world to slow down and operate at a speed it was meant to, not a speed that we try to put it at when I’m somewhere like New York or on a plane,” Jones shares.

Jones also spends his time teaching his 16-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter important life lessons that have been shaped by his time on the battlefield.

“I talk to my son about this all the time: don’t pass something that needs to be done just because somebody didn’t tell you to do it,” he shares of the wisdom he imparts. “And that’s not just a battlefield lesson, that’s the military lifestyle. It’s this idea that every effort we put into something makes life better for everybody, and we have to work in concert that way. I think in this country, and especially in life, we focus on things that seem like they’re going to be better for us in the moment. But, if they make things worse for everybody around us, chances are, it doesn’t help us out either. That’s the number one thing you need to know in combat. Whatever you do, it needs to be focused towards the mission, not just what you want in that moment.”

Those lessons also echo throughout each of the stories featured in Behind the Badge. In its pages, the chaos of flashing lights, sirens, gunfire, and search and rescue missions is laid bare in unflinching detail, yet is threaded with a portrait of quiet resilience – a reminder that the work of first responders is not only about survival, but carrying the weight of other people’s darkest hours with grace.

Like the farm Jones tends to back home in Georgia, Behind the Badge is rooted in the simple but profound truth that life is best lived in service to something larger than oneself. It is Jones’s testament to the beauty of duty, the strength found in community, and the enduring belief that the measure of a life is found not in what we keep for ourselves, but what we give away in service to others.