YOU DON'T HAVE WHAT IT TAKES with Johnny Joey Jones

this special episode of the danger close podcast is brought to you by Red Sky morning the seventh novel in the James Reese terminal list series it is coming in hot on May 14th at hard cover ebook and audiobook go to official jackard ccom to pre-order your copy today welcome to the danger close podcast my guest today Marine Corps veteran Johnny Joey Jones He is the author of unbroken bonds of battle he lost both legs in Afghanistan incredible guy you can find him now on the Fox News Channel and now without further Ado Joey Jones dude we've been meaning to do this for a while thank you so much for for joining me I sincerely appreciate it and uh first what where are you what's in the background there yeah I'm in uh this is my breakout route I uh my wife now back in April made a decision to sell everything we had and we bought this little cow Farm a whole lot closer uh a whole lot closer to where our family is is it's actually in the town that my son goes to school you know my son's been with his mom his whole life as far as during the school year and it's a long story but my wife and I have been in his in his life since he was one year old and um you know you're there for the summer vacations you're there for every other weekend that you can get every other school break you can get you know I sell days to to have him at my house all the time as he's growing up but going into high school just what I believe life is all about being a man teaching your son to a man be there for him teach them to be as you know you know C hands and a soft touch the whole deal I really felt like having more time with them was important uh on the day-to-day basis on the little things and so I talked to my wife about it and we're like you know what let's move and so we moved up here to the town he goes to high school which ironically his mom ended up moving 45 minutes away so he's about 50% of the time in our house now and um and so we I say a little cow Farm it's 40 acres and uh a nice enough house my happy with my wife was happy but for me the main cave is this Barn I have so uh that's where I'm at right now nice and can you hunt on the property yeah I've got a I've got a river that backs up to the property and there are deer all around us but honestly what I've hunted on this property more than anything is I've got a pond in front of my house and there have been 20 to 50 geese on that pond every month of the year so at the beginning of season and at the end of season we had to uh we had to alleviate the herd there a little bit amazing amazing well I love it but uh I know I only have you for an hour but uh man I gotta tell you um this is an emotional read I was not expecting that at all um you know I expecting a couple you know part here or there you know this is incredible and it's not all about you I love how you how you've done it with these stories of people that you've know or you met after or during or through someone else but then have your commentary as well but the intro you're an amazing writer the intro is it's so good U but very emotional read I think every American needs to read this but I want to ask you about your dad and uh growing up in that wisdom I mean you start off with him in this in this book and that uh that that wisdom that he passed on to to you um so uh obviously very influential in your life so um tell me about your dad yeah no it's I you know when we wrote the book I say we because I worked with a um another writer and he interviewed to the people in there based on me outlining what what I felt like their story was but they were so close to me I was really afraid that if I interviewed him I wouldn't get their story I'd get their story in relation to me and so I worked with this guy Gary broak he's really great writer and he interviewed them and transcribed their their thoughts and helped me organize them then like you said the stuff that's in my voice I wrote and so when it came time for me to do my part of the writing um there were these things that came to be that I had no idea were there I didn't know that's what was on my heart I didn't know that's where I wanted to go but I read all of their chapters and then I'd go through and read each chapter and kind of write down notes and I kind of did this process I made up on my own and I learned that the themes were in no particular order a fatherson relationship or in some cases lack thereof football and hunting and a theme in the sense of not only is it something that most of the guys in the book and and the one female not have in common but more so the the the dynamic that showed through that not only do we have these things in common but they were vitally important to becoming the men that we became and making the choices that we made when you read a book you read like Danny Ridgeway wouldn't be a marine if you had to joined a hunting club and Gregor bloi wouldn't be a marine if he hadn't missed his father figure and was looking for that and Amos Benjamin wouldn't be in our Liv uh if if it weren't for the struggles he had and having his older brother fill that role of Father uh and losing his dad way he did so I didn't really process all that I just read and enjoyed and then sat down and said okay what do I have to say and you know from the talks I give when I'm in front of a crowd to obviously this book I usually don't make it a couple minutes mentioning my dad and um and I think the reason why um he's been so influential in my life in death even more so than in life I lost him back in 2019 um and it and I was there for it you know you've put guys on the bird and you don't think much about it in the minute until later on but when you do CPR your dad man it just it's a different world and um and so for my dad he was 5'8 he was he had social anxiety uh he was very disciplined he's pretty much the opposite of me in every way think of you know I'm this guy that's outgoing I love to be in the crowd if it's my crowd I was 61 when I had legs I'm about six foot now and uh and both of his brothers were well over six foot tall his dad was over six foot tall he was literally the run of the family but he was the oldest brother he was the one that everybody went to when they needed help and he was the kind of man that you know that St Jack ball trades master of none he knew how to do everything and he knew how to do it right and that was important to him it wasn't worth doing if it wasn't if he didn't want to do it right so that's how with internal discipline I kind of refer to him almost as like a bonic hero he needed to suffer some to be happy with where his place was like he felt like his place in life was to provide and protect and there needed to be a little bit of pain and Agony in that some of it self-imposed and some of it due to the nature of the fact he was a brick and block Mason but he enjoyed to be by himself and to feel like he gave something up for those around him and I think in that way he definitely left an impact on me oh yeah I mean definitely you can tell by the way that that you write about him in here it was really cool to to read that and also to read about how he could walk into a room and do the do the math on on just the building know just just was so good at that sort of thing um because that's and it stood out to me because it's a skill that I do not possess but uh when when he was taking for those rides in the in the truck was really cool you said he took you in the in his truck to get you to sleep as a kid and then later in pass on lessons like you got on that truck and you went on these Backcountry roads and he would pass along this wisdom to you when you think about those rides like is there one that stands out to you with some something he passed along oh yeah absolutely um well we did it a lot and we called it lrin if you're from the south this is one of those words that makes so sense but it does and the reason why is even we go out and we were going to go to one person's house the next thing you know you're going to somebody else's house and they 10 miles in between and you know five hours into it you visited 10 people and driven 100 miles and uh and he as a brick and block Mason what he liked about it was every job site was somewhere new so every week he went to a new place of work and he never wanted to go there and back the same way so he he knew the roads better than fireman do like you could drop him off on Highway 225 anywhere from for 100 miles and you know exactly where he was at and so we go on these rides but part of it for him was just just kind of that was his opportunity I think to connect with me and talk and and he was had his eyes forward his hands on steering well and he could just talk to this person in the seat so I the one that sticks out probably the most is in right after high school my long-term girlfriend who was now my wife so I figured it out but she broke up with me and you know as a guy you your heart get broken you're like okay well I can just make this one change and we should be able to get back together again this is no big de right like you think I'm selfish I just won't be selfish and we'll fix this and move on and you know with women it just doesn't work that way it took me 10 years to get her back you know but uh but my dad saw that I was kind of moping around and this was my first time really getting my heart broke and uh he said you know what we were working up I forgot where it was at and I found this cave why don't we take this rope go check this cave out so my buddy Keith was with me and he's a smaller guy than me and next thing you know we're driving for an hour and a half to get to some cave he knew about probably knew about it for like last 30 years but he made it sound like he just saw it the other day and um and long story short we get there and I'm too big to go down in the H we tie a rope that we use on scaffolding on the brick job around my buddy Keith's waist and lower him down in there and he's down in there he's finding stuff people painted on the walls it gets real big and cavernous down in there CU we're up in the mountains and uh but the whole drive out there drive back he just kind of really what he did was let me talk and then he'd have a little anecdote to say here there but I think the point of it was more than anything you know the way he would frame things he kind of wanted me to know hey getting your art broks a good thing because that means that you've had you've known what the relationship is and you you've been in in something like that and and he was always Optimus he's like I just give her some time you know but he' say stuff like one of his favorite sayings was don't complain about the rain complain about its timing and really what he means by that is things happen to you in life some times they're a blessing they just don't feel like it in the moment and that was very much how he felt about her breaking up with me I'd been talking to her Marine Corp recruiter actually went to her house and said look I'm not I'm not joining the Marine Corps because of you but you're the only reason I would stay and she looked at me and smiled and said well have a good time in boot camp so yeah looked back and I think they were all in on it they all knew that I needed to get out of town and go grow up a little bit and uh and he was excited to see me do that oh man yeah it really comes across in the in the book what's what year did you join the Marine Corps and why did you choose uh the core rather than another service I well listen I know who I'm talking to but just hear me out on this this is you know this was my experience in the moment this was I love to tell this story um if you'll if you'll humor me it's a great story because I think a lot of people can relate I I grew up in a small town Dalton Georgia I graduated high school in 2005 so I had guys i' played football with that had already joined and gone to war and come back but the war was still pretty early looking back now and I remember thinking man I better hurry up and get in there I'm going to miss this thing and you know here we are looking back going I could have become a doctor and still fall in this war and so maybe I got a little ahead of myself my two best friends T me in the joining and the reason I chose a ringor weren't anything and I've only recently really put thought into this I went you know the Army recruiter would come and he would promise college and the Air Force recruiter would come and he would promise an occupation 9 to5 that you could have after the Air Force the Navy recruiter would come and he would promise travel you know see the world sell the world and then the Marine Corps recruiter would come and say ah you know what I don't think you have what it takes you're welcome to try you know and it was that demeanor and that idea of well don't tell me I can't do it you know don't tell me that you know and that idea that it would grow me up and turn me into something better I played football and laid brick and block but I was still you know a teenager and I I had a lot of growing up to do and my dad was big on respect he was the kind of guy that he acted like he had been in the military just the way he carried himself and I don't know where it came from other than his two grandads but it was an easy transition for me but I didn't have it all before I got there just because my dad acted that way I needed somebody else to tell me that's the way you act to to appreciate it in my dad and so the Marine Corp recruiter just kind of had that air about him is a is a muscular guy he was kind of big and um and he really was intimidating and he made me feel like he was doing me a fa to sign on that dotted line and as much as you know we make fun of that now I'm glad it's the way it was man that is that is awesome uh so does that mean that you were like an eighth grade on 911 ninth grade I I graduated at 17 okay and uh so yeah I was in ninth grade and I remember watching the first Tower fall in Wake training um I was that they had a TV on there and it was never wrongs it want us work out and the coach came in turned the TV on was W Hing for football and that evening we were out on the football field or later that week I can't remember and our coach we were all laying on our back dressing and the coach kind of took a minute and said look up guys see what you don't see and there were no planes in the sky and he and I can't remember if it was that day or later it was early on and he said you know what happened today may not register now but it's changing the world and it's going to change your life too and uh and I really appreciate it he was a ring for veteran and uh and he saw he knew what was coming and he knew a bunch of us out there on that football field we're gonna be wearing uniform wow and then Y where along the lines did you find out about did you know about it before or once you got in path into into yod man my I say this all time my family were Moonshiners if they if they were doing Public Service it was in an orange jumpsuit because they got caught doing what they weren't supposed to do I didn't have a a big military influence one of my best friends his dad had served in Desert Storm and was was also a teacher and a coach and so I I was around him but it was still somebody else's dad it wasn't anybody in my field and so um I joined the Marine Corps without knowing anything about it other than like full metal jacket and when you watch Full Metal Jacket be Beyond being just an amazing piece of Cinema it is also kind of multiple movies in one but by the time you get to you know the the scenes where they're deployed you realize that private Joker is combat journalist right he he's not an infantry but you see these scenes where he's fighting for his life and so without any other version of the military in front of me I'm like okay well we're all going to live in a squad Bay and carry a rifle and some of us are smart enough to learn other jobs that's kind of what I thought it was going to be so the recruiter got me in on a Communications Electronics contracts I was fixing radios and evidently I had the intelligence for it but I did not have the interest in being in this sterile environment grounded to a table soldering so I started raising my hand for everything the minute I got to my first Duty station which was in Hawaii so I went on USS Rushmore and flipped pancakes for three months for rack I became a range coach uh I ended up uh guarding nuke Subs at Pearl Harbor when they changed the nuclear rods out if there was a detail I volunteered for it for two reasons I wanted to see what else was out there and I wanted to be so bad at working on radios they let me go do something else and so um I ended up I was able in a very roundabout way and the rainor prize itself on having the least amount of people and the most amount of jobs so you can laterally move and be buil all over the place back at this time anyway and so I ended up being U mounted security for convoys in Iraq in 2007 and my team got picked to be the EOD security so rather than the Convoy we did EOD escort and I some some experience with EOD and Pearl Harbor they would kind of war game us with fake IEDs and I'd already kind of started a package because I learned about it but I didn't know much about it I just wanted to do something different but then doing the security Forum in uh in Iraq in 2007 and eight I ended up putting that package in interviewing with that team and doing on the job training with that team for I think six of 10 months I was there and I picked it and the inquir you have to you can't come in off the street on a contract for EOD simply because there aren't a lot of Marines so there isn't a huge EOD fi and they spend a lot of money they give the Navy lot of money to train you and they don't want to send you unless they know you're going to do it so you has to be an E5 to do EOD um in the RoR oh interesting I wonder if you can go in the Navy on an EOD contract I think you can I think there's some sort of a but it's kind of like probably the seal route and and uh rescue swimmer where they give you the opportunity to try out it like guarantees you a try out more than anything else so it really doesn't make a difference at all maybe they can tack a couple years on or something I'll tell you the Navy's smart so what the Navy did back everything's different now it's hard to believe I've been out of the Marine Corps for more than 10 years I've been out of the ud fil for that long but back when I was in school and and really working in the field what they would do the Navy I don't remember if on the enlisted side if they had uh lower rank con open contracts I think all the other three services bring in commissioned officers in which you can come in young the mar Court didn't do any commissioned officers in their e field either it was all one officer and laterally uh ldos and so what the Navy did do that I thought was awesome is and you know this a little bit of a derogatory term but we didn't know it as that but they had what what they called buds D that would come because they'd already been through dive school and they they had that training and they ended up leaving buds for reasons that weren't bad character and so they brought them over to the EOD community and they did really well there they' already already had all the prerequisites to work in special Warfare and they brought them over to EOD so a lot of the guys came from that no kidding uh so is it the same school did you go to Navy EOD school for the recor okay yeah it's funny it's a Navy ran school on an Air Force piece of property 51% of the students are army and uh a disproportionate amount of the instructors are Marines and it's just kind of that's the culture it works really well no kidding yeah one of my dearest friends is a former Navy EOD guy and I think I can say his name I put him in the back of the book he's never said uh I shouldn't so Jeff roor am amazing guy and I always check what I put EOD wise in the novels I send it to him and ask him to to uh kind of fix it up if I made anything atrocious mistake but also take like one ingredient out or one Ty thing out just so some kid doesn't blow themselves up in the basement type of a deal but my whole that is always so that if an EOD guy reads it and gets to one of these places where I'm building an ID or having the guy whatever it is um that they say oh he put in the work he put in the work to try to get this right uh and oh look what he left out I see what he did here so that's my goal always with the building IEDs or talking about EOD and this last one I put a na Marine Corps EOD guy who helped save the day in this last book it's uh that's awesome um and uh how was that school for you did you have any any uh issues is there high attrition there I mean it seems like a stressful thing to go do I me I could never I mean I've been out with you you guys you know with us to just run through the houses with us and attach the whole thing that never have to do the job and then I've been out stopping the Convoy and having you guys walk up to something and uh more often than not they would just pick it up and like throw it in the back of the H and there would go or blow it up blow in place or whatever but oh my gosh so much respect for anybody that chooses to do that and then do does it downrange it's just incredible it was interesting you know when I came in the movie Heart Locker just come out and that's not very accepted in the community for a lot of obvious reasons um oh my gosh and there's this culture in in EOD it's kind of across the board I can primarily speak to Marine and navy because that's where spent most of my time but we really strive to be completely silent professionals the idea is if you want any of the credit you're doing it for the wrong reasons you g get somebody hurt and uh you know with with with guns or bombs it's the same thing like that that mentality has to be there what you do after you leave is different but while you're in you want to be as Anonymous and part of this so we don't give challenge coins we'll give an EOD badge you know we don't even make challenge coins most of the time um and it's that idea of you know you're just you're ranking file and what you do is important but you you don't do it for the credit so when you know Heart Locker came out there was some of that about I don't even know his name the guy that kind of was the inspiration for it but I loved it once I learned the job for two reasons just like you said number one you can't learn anything about the job watching the movie like you can't because nothing in the movie is very accurate some things are egregiously inaccurate but what it does do is it translates the intensity of the job and I think a lot of bod Tech Stop shy of really thinking through this the most intense moment work in an ID everything's quiet and still there's not noise there's not commotion there are a bunch of Marines provide security hoping nothing goes wrong making sure no one messes with you while you do your job you can just about hear your sweat leave your brow and drop on the ground as you're deciding what to do now you're very confident it's not like in the movies where like red wire or or blue wire when you see the problem is what we call it the ID you know what actions you're going to take you're just methodically doing it and so you can't translate that intensity into Cinema without other things for the audience to feel it so when people walk away from barlocker I think they have a very real and accurate feeling of what that job is like the intense moments there there isn't a moment really where you're in a bomb suit and you pull a pistol on somebody but that intense moment that standoff that the audience can actually digest and understand in that scene is what I feel leaning over an ID that I've seen a 100 times hoping this isn't one that's booby tra and so I think to get that across to people and to go back to your original question of kind of what was it like in that school and kind of why do it almost um it's just kind of cross-section of uh of arrogance and ignorance and and the best version of both you are just arrogant enough to buy into the idea that if you've done everything you're supposed to do you're going to win and you're just ignorant enough to the fact that the truth being if the enemy does everything right it's hard for you to win and so I use those two words to kind of capture people's attention but I'm not calling it's arrogant or ignorant it's the the best version of those two uh ideas because you really have to be able to turn off in the back of your mind that survival Instinct that says don't do this it will kill you and you do it not because you're want to be a cowboy or you want you do it because somebody has to I mean somebody has to that's the only way to get down this road to get across this bridge to win this war to take these people on and we do breed a culture of learn everything inside and out share information take data I mean every time I worked in IED even in the worst conditions I've got a little back then a little digital camera I'm taking cardinal directions taking pictures writing down notes so at some point either tomorrow or next month I write a report and share that information with the other EOD tees and they they do a great job of creating a culture in the school because they can't kill you right they can't just blow you up for making a mistake that kind of that's more of a Russian tactic and so uh they can't just let you get blown UPS so you're working on W or this but they have to create that anxiety to see how you're going to deal with it so the way they structure the school it's a train running on a track right like it's you're constantly moving every you're there are 10 or 12 sections and no one section is more than about a week most sections are less than a week you test about three times in each section so there are days where you learn about this new section this morning you're testing this afternoon or you moved into it this afternoon you're testing tomorrow morning you got to make an 86 or better on the test and pass I'm sorry an 85 or better on the test to pass so you're making 84 you fail well 16-point hit is something that would kill you an eight-point hit is something that might kill you a four-point hit is something that could kill you and so they create this anxiety because if you fail a test there you have to retake it right away if you fell it twice you're technically out of school you got to go in front of a board and talk them into letting you back in in which case you you've lost your class because that train kept moving and a couple of days later you got to go back to the beginning of the next one coming through so they create this academic intensity and for a school that's probably 50% laterally moving into it that means half your students know they've got to go back to being a cook or or whatever it was they wanted to leave so they really want to be there they really want to get through this school and so you create that anxiety the stress but in a positive way of hey it's not just perform it's make a 100 De time and our our our slogan up until or motto up until honestly we had so many guys get killed was initial success or total failure total failure not meaning you die total failure meaning you didn't protect those rounds you know you didn't you either take care of this bomb R blows up uh we we changed it because it it added the negative connotation to the sacrifice a lot of guys made because back to the original statement if the enemy does everything right you just may not be able to win today so intense I me I mean the enemy is always adapting you're always trying to adapt to the enemy you're looking for gaps in the enemy's defenses capitalizing on momentum all those different things but from 2001 onward it seems like the IED threat was the thing that was constantly evolving faster than almost anything else on the enemy side and we were always trying to scramble to catch up figure out different countermeasures whatever and then they would adapt back and forth so really yeah tactics and other weaponry and those sorts of things yes but that IED threat is the one that stands out to me as the one that was constantly evolving at a pace that I can't even describe um what was it called the asymmetric Warfare group or some sort of an IED working group back in the day so uh one of them started with a Jay uh yeah Jay dos or something like that there was a couple different ones yeah but they did a really good job I mean I remember having to go in and you see everything laid out I remember it was either green zone or B app or somewhere but all the different new technologies that the enemy was using how they were adapting to our counter measures and back and forth and then giving reports like from how me and my guys saw things to pass along or whatever just to try to build that knowledge base and that foundation for guys already in theater and then guys that were coming into theater doing your job so man nothing but the most respect in the world for everybody that does that EOD job it's uh it's it's incredible um so first deployment then what is it like uh working your first real problem when it's not Schoolhouse yeah was it was it was interesting I you know I get into this a little bit when I give talks I talked about it a little bit in P excess book called modern vators in my chapter but in the Marine Corp field you're all in this very tight array of rank right E5 E6 E7 our E8 and e9s are on the master Master Gunnery Sergeant side they they we don't allow any first sergeants or sergeant majors and the reason why is those two ranks can come from other units to be in EOD you have to wear the batch the way it's structured now it could change one day if we were as big as the Navy it would be different but because we're so small we can breed our own officers and still function and so all of our senior enlisted are Master Master Gunnery sergeants that still can do the job many of them we're still taking bonds apart because quite frankly we didn't have enough of us for how many were getting blown up and then also all our officers rather one officers or one officers have became limited Duty Officers and for those that don't know that's essentially a warant officer enlisted person who ashes over to the officer side in a very limited way inside the job field and inside the service you can trade those warant officer bars in for uh the Insignia of a captain uh major Lieutenant Colonel you get a little bit more responsibility but you're still limited unlike a commission fully commissioned officer the reason why I point that out is the D the dynamic between a teammate and the team waiter because to take one step back Afghanistan was so much more work heavy uh workload heavy than our Iraq in Iraq we could take two thre man teams in a truck what we call a jerve or or an imra and they could span all everything around alisat you know was really big they could get on a road drive there work the ID come back go out in like a fireman response kind of way when we got to Afghanistan in the Helman Province you're in these poppy fields and you're two or three villages back from a main road and you're walking through these poppy fields across these Bridges the truck goes out the window the robot goes out the window we choose not to do the bomb suit for for tech technical reasons to begin with so now you're on patrol with the grunts when they're out doing their job if it's a raid or just a patrol or an intelligence or reconnaissance whatever you're with them because it's not just when they happen to come across one but now you've got intelligence and you're going after and you know what's going to be there probably will so you're you're gearing up and you're going out with them every time so we went from a three-man team to a two-man team because we had to have a team of EOD techs and every grunt company in that area of operation so we went from six EOD Texs covering this area to 30 EOD teexs covering this area same area same amount of Marines there and so you have a team leader and yourself I was a sergeant my team leader was a staff sergeant there were some teams where you had two staff sergeant some teams where you had two sergeants some teams where you had two e8s that work together because your rank was nowhere near as important as your seniority and time and experience and so I had a a team leader to add a a couple of deployments under his belt and I was looked at among the young guys as at least a guy who had been on an ljt deployment and was familiar with the job of how it's done I haven't done it but I've sat past the receip and watched it done so I was given a little bit more responsibility early on and quite frankly the way things played out in in Afghanistan the idea would be in the traditional sense you deploy as the third man on the team and you run the robot and watch then you deploy as the second man on the team you get out of the TRU truck and you help the guy walking down range be his eyes and ears then you Deploy on your third deployment as a team leader and you're the only one walking down taking the bomb apart it didn't work like that in Afghanistan if you find it you work it because if he's 10 feet over there I've got an ID here the chances of him having one at his feet one in between us it wasn't worth the risk you better have the skill set and have done the training and read the reports and at least can talk to your team leader and make good decisions so I worked my first IED the first day I was at my fob so I was about six days in Afghanistan when I worked my first IID um and that was exhilarating it I I was addicted like that and I hate to say it that way that's not the the character I want to put out there but it's the truth like I was young I had spent a couple of years of my life finding my way in this job fi I'd seen it done on half of deployment I'd gone through the school I'd excelled among my years I wanted to be there and be taking apart bonds that's what I wanted to do and I hadn't yet lost that good friend and I hadn't yet seen that good buddy I hadn't yet had my world rocked now shortly after this I did and it puts everything into perspective but from the first ID till the one that took my legs I enjoyed the job I mean it it is it's um an adrenaline rush it's hard to find there are a lot of yod techs that are skydivers and motorcycle riders because they're looking for that you know and I guess for me it's live television talking about things that people like to get mad about but you you once you do it you need it you know yeah that might be the scariest of all man I'm getting anxious just hearing you talk about it um but uh every time those guys went and did their job I mean I'm feeling it right now like I'm thinking about some of those things and being so nervous for them which is why I always liked when we just blew them up or shot him with a 50 or like did something like like that that seemed much more sensible than walking to to one um man that was just wild what so after you did get your world rocked and lost that friend whether they were with you or it was somewhere else in theater or or wherever else what was it like to then walk up on your next one yeah so what happened was uh it was interesting so we went for a while before it was really calm when we got there uh they were harvesting the poppy so they weren't fighting as hard um and we really didn't expect a a tough deployment it to put things in a broader geopolitical Spectrum this was the summer of 2010 and coming into the midterms or coming into the election season at the end of that year uh President Obama's administration had postured hey we're pulling out of Afghanistan and so from the Pentagon down the idea was they're goingon to lay in wait they're gonna let us get out of there before they really there's no reason for them to attack us because we're pulling out and it could be because of the pundit reaction it could be for reasons I don't know it was we ended up with the opposite I think they thought they could push us out even quicker get us away from the areas most important to them like the the agricultural area where they harvested poppy our operations was trying to remove Poppy and and supplant it with wheat to try to give them a more legitimate crop you know it's tell a drug dealer to go sell bread you know and uh I mean I guess with with the current War wheat is a little bit higher value commodity that I realized but still it was um it was interesting to try to get villagers to not grow poppy when they've done it for a thousand years and so they really fought harder we didn't know that but it took a month or two for that to happen so we got there early we got there in March and I want to say it was May before one of our guys was hit one of my one of the guys in my platoon so you know it's weird too because you you work up and you and you you live every day with a platoon of 30 but then when you get to Afghanistan you're Wen up in the two-man team so your platoon scattered all over you're communicating with them via vsat with reports and so in the same day two of our guys the guy named Dave line lost his legs and a guy named Adam Perkins lost his life two different ents two different places and it was weird you know they were in places counties away from me but from that day on it was Gang Busters everywhere you know they decided to go to work in Taliban and so I remember Dave L was guy I knew pretty well I didn't know Perkins as much and I remember hearing that and I was like you know if he can get H anybody can I had a lot of respect for him he seemed to really know the job he had just been on deployment and back then I was real B running not so much now for obvious reasons but uh I've laced up the tennis shoes I have with me and the E my EOD T was right next to the helicopter pad and I just remember going out there and running around the helicopter pad till my feet bled and I just I think in the back of my mind without making it a fully conscious thought it was like Hey I mean n to do this again you know that's that is consequence of this job you know if you don't lie if you get hit you don't die probably not taking both feet home with you and so that was my visceral initial reaction was just to go out there and run and yeah I was processing it too I don't think it changed how I approached the job because I was confident and you have to be not cocky but you have to be confident hey I did this and I did that I checked this box I lo for a remote control I look for uh um any type of command wire I look for the right things before I approach this ordinance I've got a Jammer running uh that or this ID that should Jam any type of remote control I've done a circle to look for command where I know that when I go down there the only thing that can set this off is me and I'm going to do everything right to not let that happen but it does put it in perspective it goes from a from a almost for me early on a sense of Joy like hey I went down and did it and that's awesome too a sense of relief hey I'm back we got the ID done let's get ready for the next one yeah that Rel is something that uh that really Rings you know resonates with me this special episode of the danger close podcast is brought to you by Red Sky morning the seventh novel in the James Reese terminal list series it is coming in hot on May 14th at hard cover ebook and audiobook go to official jackard dcom to pre-order your copy today what was the day like when you were wounded yeah it's uh that's an important one right so it was August 6 2010 um hmon you know it's not hard like in Iraq and I think it was because it was the first war in a sense it wasn't the first but it was the first one to blow up in the headlines from 2003 to 20078 you know that was fuia and radi and Hadith and hit and all these cities that either in culture or at least in the Marine Corps you really knew about they were you know huge cities that we went into and learned so much from in Afghanistan it was more of a slow steady burn but there were little moments that were incredibly impactful that we learned so much from it changed our tactics one of them was the city of marsin so when we took Marg we took it slowly and we learned a lot from it but before we took it or before before we held it um we had nazad before NAD was um I can't remember the other cities so we learned each time we did these cities so even though it wasn't we lost 50 guys we lost a guy in a way that really sucked and we took that and everybody knew about it we implemented on the next one so before I believe this was before we took Mars that they wanted to take a smaller town called Safar Bazar and Implement a tactic they wanted to use which was taking mlcks which are linear explosives that are that are stretched out by a rocket putting them on the back of a flatbed 7 ton and shooting the rocket over the cab of the seven ton down the street and setting it off and the engineers thought they could sympathetically detonate the IEDs in the street by doing this well the opposite happened it became a huge problem we we Lobby against it but when there are a few hundred of us and they've got Colonels that are Engineers it's hard to hard to go in and really AR make that argument so what happened was all these EDS the construct of an ID in Afghanistan is a loop c a loop circuit like um the dollar store Flashlight you would take apart you have a Battery Source you have a switch that disconnects the circuit then you have your your main charge is initiated by blasting gal which is your light bulb in that analogy that's simple it's a closed loop circuit um there's one switch arming it is a little bit risky so what they would do is they would put the main charge and the Press pressure plate right on top of it in the path that they wanted you to step on it pressure plate being you'd step on it and set it off but they would take eight or 10 diesel batteries solder them together run it 34 yards away and plant that somewhere so that when they came up they'd put the IED in the ground but when they came up to put the power source to it if something went wrong and it was short circuited they wouldn't blow themselves up putting power to it that's the last thing they would do well the other effect talking about that chest gain is they found a way to make the main charge and the pressure switch non- metallic so the only thing that our metal detectors which was our main use our our main tool to detect the only thing was metallic were the power sources they would be ran under walls they' be ran at the base of trees places we wouldn't automatically think to sweep or couldn't sweep because they were dug under a wall it's what made it very difficult we our detection method was mostly human intelligence when we got ready to to go into Safar bizar we had to tell the town we were coming and it was far far enough away from poppy that its primary purpose was trading and we knew because of that the IED components were coming in and out of there from all over that region so we had identified one building that we knew we thought it was a hotel from that Old Falcon View I mean if they knew the drones the Drone footage back then is not what you see now you know so we identified it as a hotel because vehicles that we were tracking would pull in save for D le when we got there we realized it's a storage facility and it was literally this building this part is full of Main charges switches pressure plates initiators and um and so we started clearing the streets first and because we told them we were coming they just took all those ID components and made the tail into a Minefield we found 207 functional IDs in two square kilometers um with six EOD techs three two man teams so to fast forward here a little bit when they took these rockets and they shot them down these roads and they tried to sympathetically blow up these bombs explosives don't work that way that that didn't blow up any of the main charges what it did do was it severed those wires so now you have these exposed wires you don't know if that wire is going to a switch which means it's still energized and if you connect them it blows you up or if that wire was going to a battery which means that keep them away from each other and there's no power to it so you're crawling around on your hands and knees with pieces of black tape trying to tape these wires to insulate them so you can go back and prosecute pull on with the hook and line or sweep on with the m detector find out what component you have that's been severed in front of you and where the main charge is and the power source this is very stressful uh for five days we worked really hard my teammate now worked almost 30 IEDs in those five and a half days the other two teams worked about 20 between them we just had the the L share the word because of where we were and on the morning of the sixth morning this Marine engineer a reservist from Tennessee named Daniel Greer uh he was a full-time fireman join the RoR reserv because he wasn't doing enough to serveice Country uh he woke me up he said sorry Jones we found something we want you to take a look at so my teammate and I literally walked across the street from where we were birthing uh it was the swords facility and they had found some conventional ordinance that they had recovered off the battlefield so they really needed us to look at it long story short my teammate moved it realized we probably shouldn't it was a loot tube this big candle in the sky and I learned in school that you don't move them because they could turn into a candle on their shoulder and so he walked away and I over there to look at it because I wanted to see if it was what we call a hung strike or if it could still turned into a fire mall and when I walked when I stepped away from it with my right foot I stepped on an ID and kind of the the iry in this whole situation is um no matter how many times you swept in youra you don't know that you got it clear I mean we had lost a a Corman that was the 11th man and the 12 man Patrol we need 10 people probably stepped on an ID before he did just happens that way sometimes so we had cleared that area multiple Marines have been in there I just stepped in just the right spot the worst part about it was obviously it took my legs almost took my arm punctured a lung but it took Daniel Greer's life um he was provide security for me while I did my job I gotten him out of the blast radius but I hadn't gotten him out of the frag radius which sometimes it's a concession you make and a piece of that wall flew through the air in front of me and hit him under the kevar and just the right spot to um toh take his brain activity away traumatic brain injury yeah yeah reading about that part with his uh his widow going to Germany in the book I mean I know we don't have time to uh go through I was gonna ask you about a bunch of the different stories in here but I'm almost glad that we don't because it is so emotional to read I know I'd get emotional just uh asking you about them and hearing you you talk about them um what's the next thing you do you remember the the blast and being there or what what do you remember next after the blast yeah you know you need to school me up because I'm I'm writing a second book and I don't know how to promote a book like I don't they wanted me to write a book about me and you saw what I produced and and it's not some fake humility like I just don't know how to do that and so but I believe in this book and and the one of the last chapters in the book is Daniel ge's Widow and so I tell that story through her lens not mine it's not about what happened to me it's about what happened to her she's a real victim that day in my opinion and so what happened the next is um the guys got me off the battlefield and I think I tell the story in the book but um they took Daniel off the battlefield first and you know triage is you take the worst first unless the worst is so bad there's nothing you can do and so when they took Daniel Greer first I could let I was letting on my back I could see him in front of me he was his oriented completely different because i' been flying to the air but he had all his limbs he wasn't bleeding he was kind of all his belly looking back to me like he was knocked out and um and when they took him off the battlefield I'm like well he's not dead and he's not missing limbs like does that mean I'm so bad that there's just nothing they can do for me I tried to put a tourniquet on my left arm was around behind me so I couldn't see it my legs were gone I was lay on my back when I reached up with my right arm to grab a trinket off my shoulder it was severed all but the but the the muscle in the back it was split and so I had no control over the hand and so I couldn't do a tourniquet and so finally a marine got to me and as he's working on me they take Daniel Greer off I thought well you know maybe like this is it so I look at him I said hey um I wasn't thinking Daniel wasn't going to make it I was thinking I wasn't going to make it why they took him first I said hey man say the Lord's Prayer with me so we we kind of do our father Lord in heaven and then we both kind of pause and almost simultaneously we kind of gave it with liberty and justice for all and kind of had a chuckle because we didn't know the Lord's Prayer so sometimes it's intent not execution you know but um finally some rings got to me they they got some tourniquets on me hit me with the morphine about 10 minutes into it my ey swelled shut and uh and the Commander's unit was with me and he later told me that I just kept saying saying hey I'm sorry I screwed up sorry I let you down and so I think I was kind of panicking I was going in the shock and I was really starting to get upset because in my mind through the through the trauma and the shock was I caused other people to die you know and so they finally knocked me out pretty quick sedated me I woke up two days later in laun St when they woke me up my body was was bandaged and tubes and external fixtures on both arms and I was happy to see I had both arms it took me a while to remember but I fin they did and um the first thing I asked the nurse when they woke me up was where's Greer I didn't put any thought into it it wasn't being you know altruistic or anything I just um it was the last thing I saw so I wanted to know the outcome and she looked at me and without missing the beat she said don't worry on you'll walk again and I when I I do public speaking and and this is really the the premise of my entire speech is you know she told me what I needed to hear when I needed to hear it even when that wasn't what I was asking and I think that's something that that I've kept with me ever since yeah it's on page five of the book and I was the first when I was reading it I was like oh talking about your your dad here and your upbringing and then I got to that part and I was like oh like that's powerful and the rest of the of the book is uh full of moments like that so um that was amazing that nurse in Germany did you ever talk to her again or or no you know what's really cool is I've had several of the we had a full medical contingent we had what was called a mobile trauma unit which is a big sterile box sealed up on the back of a big truck and they can almost do surgery in this room and so we brought it with us on this out because it was a pretty difficult op that was the first place I went um and I've actually reconnected with several of the cormen and one of the Navy uh doctors that was involved in that unit I met one of them in Wyoming on an elk hunt it was really cool I was set up for that actually he knew and I didn't um and so I went to the Braves game with one of the Corman uh on Memorial Day um I met one just walking down on the sidewalk at Walter re a year or two later she just walked past me started balling because I never thought about it they never find out they they work so hard to save somebody's life they're alive when they leave their site but they don't know if they're gonna live and so it it was really cool I spent some time reconnecting with some several of them uh for a year or two I never reconnected with her but you know I look back and I think either she knows and that's enough or she had so many of us come through she may not need to you know that that may be something she needs to keep that that kind of chapter closed but and also the ambig the um the the lack of identity for her allows her to be who she needs to be in my story for me does that make sense and so like in my mind she had a Southern accent highly doubtful uh but that's where I'm from so she called me hun I know what was said and I know what the impact was but it's a movie in my head now it's a memory and I kind of like that wow and then how long was that recovery before you actually leave the Marine Corps and then what was the path in the few minutes we have left what was the path to Fox yeah it's it's I I'll try to be as concise as possible I'm long withed if you can't tell uh um yeah so I I got injured on August 6 2010 and back then Walter re and bees were two different places all the Marines and Corman went to Wal went to bees then all the soldiers and S and Airmen went to uh all the Marines and sailors went to Bethesda soldiers and Airmen went to Walter Reed well the problem was all the reab was at Walter Reed so you had this Ticker on you this clock when you got to Bethesda you had to heal and so recovery and Rehabilitation the recovery part is to heal and let let your body heal which was for me was surgery Monday Wednesday Friday every week for weeks on end uh they go in and open up the wounds check everything they're moving nerves a little at time so they'll goow back together they're moving muscles a little at a time so they'll reconnect to the ligament in the right way because everything's so jumbled up you tell your leg to go forward and to go sideways and so they're trying to get things reoriented that were traumatically ripped apart so that you can use Prosthetics and so that once you get healed up you move over to Walter Reed and you start learning to use Prosthetics right away they don't let you sit around so I got injured in August 2010 and I started school in October 2010 uh using a mouthpiece like I was I was in one of those go- go gadgeteers and I used a dragon device to speak my notes anday papers on campus at Walter Reed and then I went I started walking in full length Prosthetics in February 2011 so that was about a six-month process and I was driving myself to Capitol Hill and working as an intern for the house vs Affairs committee while I was active duty in June 2000 July 2011 so it was an 11mon process there about because it was right after July for so almost exactly an 11mon process from R up in Afghanistan to being independent enough to take myself to work every day um I couldn't tell you the timeline in between that you know this a specific moment but those are the markers that I remember um it took me till the end of 2012 to retire Al the Marine Corps it takes a while when you're dis injured for the VA in the ring Corp to decide what your ratings are and stuff and I didn't know I wanted to get out I lobbied really hard to stay in the ring courp and stay in EOD Tech and actually got the ring to change his policy to where catastrophic catastrophically injured guys could stay in the field and then I realized in doing so I liked policy and I lik how to get things changed worked on Capital Hill and started advocating for things and it wasn't big things it was hey if we could just get left-handed right-handed talk this isn't a problem anymore those kinds of things and little things that I knew I could get a win on I mean I didn't even have a college education yet I was helping write legislation and all Americans can it's that simple if you get access and um and that really spurred my passion in politics it wasn't Artisan based it was it was policy like outcome based and I talk all the time the difference between a task and an outcome if you're focused on the task you'll stop as soon as the task gets difficult you here no if you're focused on the outcome you'll find a new way to get it done you know if I tell you go book me a flight because I need to be in San Antonio if you're task oriented you're going to stop when the plane leaves but if you're goal oriented you're gonna throw me on a Greyhound bus and get me to San Antonio and so that's how I tackled policy what is the way we can make this happen and that open doors and open doors being in DC being outgoing being willing to speak and share my thoughts and my story just you keep meeting people I kept educating myself I I went to Yorktown and got my undergrad there and um and then I went to the private nonprofit sector for almost 10 years before Fox picked me up yeah really it seems like you've been on Fox for a long time because you're on a lot I always love when you come on and my wife when I always watch you and and really appreciate your insights into everything um but how so how did you get connected with uh with them because it seemed like all of a sudden one day like there you are and you're a pro already well that's what funny I went nearing the I I was going on as early as 2013 like on the 2m hour and nobody's watching and so I was able to kind of really develop my skill set over time this the kind of job like raing a teleprompter I know people go to school for it I didn't so either had to like you said fake it to you make it thing you know like you do it is how you learn it or you don't get to and I love that stress of hey if I don't get this right I don't get to do it again it went back to those IED days and I didn't realize it but it's what it was it was feeding that part of my my personality that had had cultured and and um conditioned and so what happened is I I was serving nonprofits that were serving my buddies and had helped me by being a keynote speaker or being an ambassador or helping even with her operations sometimes one of them had a Gaya in DC every year and through that nonprofit I met a uh a producer at Fox about a year later she asked me to come on her show and talk about Kyle Carpenter because the position that I had in in on Capital Hill didn't exist before me I snuck into it lied my way into it honestly once the Marine Corps found out I was working on Capitol Hill they couldn't make me leave because everybody already knew they're like that no-legged guy up in the house Med Affairs committee is fun to talk to so we formalized the program and brought Kyle Carpenter in after me and he was about to be awarded the Medal of Honor this is in 2013 I believe so the the this is hilarious so she asked me hey would you mind to come on television and talk about Kyle I know you recovered with it and I'm like yeah of course this was greson Carlson show called the real story and uh and so I go on and get miked up I wear a seir sucker suit and a bow tie that shows you how much I know about any of it right like the worst thing you could wear on TV because those lines vibrate and uh that's all I had I went bought it at like you know belts that day I get locked up I'm thinking what the hell I'll never do this again that big deal and I I know Kyle I know my story well I'd worked at ditra for a little while and at the Pentagon before I found my my internship on on Capital Hill so I had friends around and President Obama breaks into the show before they get to me and the essence of what he had to say was hey you know these guys Isis that I called JV last month well I'm going to send some guys over there to kill them so he's eating a little bit of crow and they're like hey we need you to respond to President Obama we'll do the carpenter story next so I text some friends I get some information I go off my instinct of what I experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq and when President Obama goes away Fox introduces me as a Afghan Iraq veteran and I give my response and that really that started the Cascade of producers saw it for other shows and and then getting in Twitter early as well was was helpful wow yeah it is stressful I mean I do a couple of them live but most all of them have been uh video and what I don't didn't realize is that a lot of times you're not looking at the host you're looking into if you're REM into like a black box and there's one person that camera but it's just a black box you hear it in your ear and then all of a sudden you're on but there's no body language like we're doing now like you can't you can't tell if they want you to hurry up or slow down there's none of those and if it's silent for a while you're kind of like uh should I wrap this up should I keep going there's no cues at all so it's very uncomfortable uh but it's still uncomfortable for me but uh but I can see how it would give you some of those same feelings as jumping out of play you or doing whatever else because you're in the moment and you're not thinking about anything else while you're on because you know that hey this is your job and there's all these people watching but here you are right now and it's live and if you mess up guess what there's no going back like in this podcast hey you know what I said at the beginning about that thing what I really meant to say was this there's none of that obviously in your two minutes and 30 seconds one of those shows especially you know prime time when you're like oh geeez uh or they ask you the question that you weren't supposed to be on there about and you're like scrambling happens yeah because you have at all and then all of a sudden you're live and they ask you a question that you didn't prep for or they don't really know that much about maybe um and sometimes those are even better because it's like natural but sometime but it can be very stressful um so I know you gotta go to the airport but uh I mean you were on I think uh live standby most of the time during the uh withdrawal so you're watching that and reacting to it you know real time with your feelings and emot with your experience there um what was that like to kind of go through that live in front of everybody and what are your thoughts on the withdrawal now in the time we have left you know to answer the question like to go back to what our previous comment that they kind of Duff tail together I never worry about people thinking Joey Jones is an idiot I worry about the people I represent there are only so many marines on television talking about these issues there are only so many Afghan veterans on TV talking about these issues there are only so many guys that talk like me that represent this region of the country that was born and raised in a trailer that that you know um that that represents I don't want to say poor but you know lower income folks that make it and I always take that responsibility as as a million pounds like I want them to feel represented and heard and their questions asked and their comments made as well through me and so when Afghanistan happened well now you know that's narrowing it down to that these are Afghanistan veterans and I and I'm not trying to speak for them but for a lot of people it sounds like I am and so I'll be completely honest with you there was such a duality in my own mind and soul during that time part of me doesn't trust anything about war at this point I I don't trust those that make the decisions I I don't have a tin full hat but I can step back and see that Bell Helicopter made a hell of a lot of money for Johnson and and we act like that didn't happen you know so there's some self-interest that is either there on purpose or not that makes me worry about the the decisions made and so I I look at the Afghanistan war and I say we need to end this now we need to be out of there our guys are still dying why and Trump comes along and he makes that decision and you want to celebrate it and then you have someone like madis that you really respect and felt like really did the right thing for the right reasons and he disagrees well then you have someone say well that that General's never won a war you're like oh wow you're right you know good intentions be downed maybe it doesn't make right decisions here maybe Trump's on to something and you start to try to figure out what's the truth like I want to Advocate like I want to advocate for killing every one of those sobs that killed the 13 at the Abbey gate I want to advocate for killing every one of those guys that I saw you know I I spent a lot of time in Afghanistan the two worst days of my life involved kids that had no clue what was going on or didn't need to and they are responsible for those deaths and I want Justice and I want revenge and I want that type of mentality that I ideological Warfare to get off of this Earth forever it's not up to me it's not even up to this country so there's a big part of me that wants to see bad people kill right that's part of being a warrior I want to defend my people and then there's this other part of me that's Now 37 years old it's got two kids that's involved in politics that has a mortgage that understands that you know we're not the center of the universe and do we need to keep sending our Young To Die to word that we're not trying to win to begin with so I'm sitting here already in this position and now Biden comes in and he withdraws everyone the way he did and and my visceral reactions how dare he how dare he surrender my War that's my that's not his War he didn't fight that war that's my War I left bless in that war how dare he get to surrender my war and I think that was the General consensus among my most liberal veteran friends of like what in the world this is how we're going to end this but then you have to give that opportunity time to breathe and say could we could we do this the right way what is the right way could we do this without Bloodshed individually on decisions there's a million things that bothered me about how it was done I think Biden's calculation was no matter how messy it gets it's before even the midterms and by the time re-election comes around he'll be known as the president that ended the Afghan war which was a tenant freed him through his entire vice presidency so it's TR to character is what he truly believes but that calculus just jumps over the idea that it wrecked the mentality of so many Warf fires it wrecked the lives of not just 13 that were killed that we talk about but the few dozen that lost legs and had traumatic brain injury had a buddy that was there that day that was an EOD Tech and had seen the worst of what IEDs had to offer and he's gotten out and started a nonprofit to help the psy the psyche of the service members that experienced what happened around that airport babies being thrown over the wall Fred's getting blown up it shook his world it changed him forever and we sit at home and because we had two decades of being numb to war it's just a headline or it feels that way well I get to be one of the guys that takes it beyond that I get to make it personal I get to explain to you why it matters not because I want you to dislike Biden his decisions if that's Trump if it's Biden whoever it is this is why these decisions and these series of events should stick with us and stick out forever even beyond the day I got injured and uh and so it was it was a roller coaster it really was a roller coaster and I tried to be consistent that's the one thing you have to be you got to be malleable and humble enough to come in the next day and say you know what here's what I learned in my sleep overnight this is what I think about it today then I think our audience was really great about following me and I think a lot of them were experiencing the same emotions man incredible I know I have to let you go I want to thank you so much for spending some time with me today had so I have so many questions for you we'll do this link up again I'm sure at some point um and uh thank you for your time and uniform everything you sacrificed for this country and for what you're doing today it's sincerely appreciated so thank you and when do a new book come out what's is it is it done or are you working on it no it's it's a 2025 project uh this is the first time I've talked about it publicly we just uh we just in the deal this week and um we're going to do a similar approach focused on uh First Responders Warriors here at home uh from the border to the small communities riding ambulances people that um that carry the psychological wounds of taking care of our society um my both of my brothers-in-law are 30-year firemen and uh and I think it's a story that needs to be told awesome awesome Well's this one highly recommend it to everybody unbroken bonds of battle and man emotional like I said you for sharing these stories everyone needs to to read this to remember uh and where people find you're on Instagram you're on Twitter where's the best place for people to to follow along you're on the news every every night um what what's uh what the best place for people to follow along yeah yeah check in Fox News Fox News Channel I'm a Fillin host there if you want to link with me specifically it's Johnny J nny Yore Joey Joe y on Twitter and Instagram I'm formerly a millennial so I'm not that active on Facebook so there you go got it I completely understand awesome man well hey get to the airport and uh thanks for everything and hopefully I'll see you soon hey thank you for everything you're an inspiration and you're doing our community of service uh with your art and we appreciate you for it thanks brother take care thank you for tuning in to the danger close podcast for more on Johnny Joey Jones be sure and pick up his book Unbroken bonds of battle follow him on Instagram and Twitter Johnny that's JN n Yore Joey j o e y you can follow me on the social channels at jackar USA official jackc car.com is the website click on shop in the upper right hand corner for the merch and if you enjoyed this conversation be sure and leave a festar rating and review wherever you get your podcasts until the next time take care out there stay safe be strong keep fighting thank you no James Reese think again Red Sky morning is available on May 14th in hard cover ebook and audiobook everywhere books are sold will there be blood count on it