Joey Jones Revealed About Losing His Legs – Hw

He’s spent five days pulling bombs out of an Afghan bazaar, one after the next, but somewhere around the 80th, the bomb pulled him out instead. The blast was so powerful, it threw him through the air. When the dust finally settled, his legs were gone above the knee, and the friend who had woken him up that morning had taken a brain injury he would not survive.

That should have been the end of this story, but it wasn’t. In the moments and days that followed, three people made decisions that kept Joey Jones alive. A girl who had let him go years before, a friend who took the blast wave, and a nurse you have never heard of who saved his life by lying to him. The first one came years before the bomb, from a girl who had no idea what she was giving him.

But before we get into that, hit the like button and subscribe to Top Rewind so you get notified every time we upload a new video. Joey was 18 the night he showed up on Meg Garrison’s porch in Dalton, Georgia. They had been together since high school. By that night, they had already broken up, but part of him was still looking for a reason to stay.

He still loved her. That was why he had come. So, he told her about the Marine Corps. The choice wasn’t because of her, but if he stayed, she would be the only reason. It was an opening, a chance for her to ask him not to go. She smiled. She said, “Go have fun.” That smile is the first decision somebody else made for him.

She could have asked him to stay. She didn’t. She handed him the door, and she watched him walk through it. Most people skip past that moment to get to the bomb. The bomb isn’t the turning point of this story. A girl on the porch in North Georgia is the turning point. Joey grew up in Dalton. His father laid brick and block for a living, work that breaks your back before it breaks your spirit.

His mother cleaned other people’s houses. The Joneses didn’t have much, but they had a code. A man’s job was to provide and protect. You worked, you didn’t complain. When something needed doing, you did it. Joey had that code in his bones the day Meg let him go. So, he enlisted. The Corps, in its infinite wisdom, looked at this country kid who wanted to fight a war.

They assigned him to fix radios. He laughs about it now. His only mental picture of war came from Full Metal Jacket. He figured if his job was radios, at least he was close to the action. He wasn’t. He was a guy in a workshop with a screwdriver. So, he started volunteering for everything. A deployment on a ship, a turn as a range coach, a turret behind a .

50 caliber machine gun in Iraq. Anything that put him closer to where Marines actually did the work. The kid from Dalton, he didn’t enlist to fix radios. He enlisted to be tested. In Iraq, 2007, he found a different kind of Marine. They wore their uniforms a little loose, their hair a little long. They called each other by first name.

By every Marine Corps standard, they were everything a Marine was not supposed to be. And they got away with it because their job was so dangerous nobody else wanted it. EOD, Explosive Ordnance Disposal. Where everybody else moved away from the loud noises, these guys moved towards them. Roadside bomb in the dirt? They walked up to it.

Suspicious package on a road? They took it apart with their hands. This isn’t a job description, that is a belief system. And Joey was about to volunteer for it. He came home from Iraq and applied. He spent nearly a year in EOD school, classroom and field. He learned to think calmly while staring at something built to kill him.

He earned the patch. The radio nerd from Dalton became a bomb hunter. By his last deployment, Joey was part of the first EOD company at Camp Pendleton. Fewer than a hundred Marines covering the entire West Coast of the Corps. They split in half and rotated through Afghanistan all year long. In just a few months, Joey’s team alone safely took apart or destroyed nearly 80 roadside bombs.

Plus, thousands of pounds of bulk explosives the Taliban had stashed in the ground. 80 IEDs is a number you really can’t picture. Not until you understand that one of them was enough to end his career. He had walked up to 79 of them and lived. The 80th was waiting. But before we get there, you need to meet a man named Daniel Greer. Daniel was a corporal with the 4th Combat Engineer Battalion.

Back home in East Tennessee, he was a fireman. The kind that runs into burning houses for a living. He had a brand new wife and a brand new baby boy who barely knew his father’s face yet. He didn’t have to be in Afghanistan. He was a Marine reservist. A fit American man in his prime. And he couldn’t stand the idea of sitting out the war while other men fought it. So he volunteered.

First for the deployment, then for Joey’s operation. Every single decision that put him in that field on that morning, Daniel made himself. That’s not a man who got unlucky. That is a man who served every step of his life until the last one. The operation was a five-day push through a town called Safar Bazaar. The Taliban had pulled out before the Marines arrived and they left a parting gift behind. A minefield.

The goal wasn’t to win the next fight. The goal was to kill whatever Marines came walking through after they were gone. For five days, Joey and his team worked through it. They pulled bombs out of doorways. They took them apart in storage stalls. They rendered safe IED after IED. The 80th was somewhere in that village.

They just hadn’t found it yet. On the fifth night, Joey Jones crawled under his truck to sleep. He didn’t know it, but he had three more hours of being a man with two legs. And Daniel Greer was the one who would wake him up at the end of them. He didn’t sleep long. Daniel woke him up early. He needed his help checking out a storage stall the size of a walk-in closet.

So, they walked together. Two Marines doing their job at the start of another long day. A CBS news crew was already in the village. They had been embedded with the unit for days, filming Joey’s teamwork. They had no idea they were about to capture a death and an amputation in the same frame.

When Joey got to the stall, he saw a flare on the ground. He had to figure out if it was still armed or already spent. He leaned over a low wall to get a better look. He stepped back to think about it. That’s when his foot found the bomb. There is no boom when an IED goes off underneath you. Movies get this part wrong.

There’s just a giant cloud of dust and the strange feeling of being completely weightless. Like the ground you trusted your whole life has decided it doesn’t want you anymore. He landed on his back. The first thing he did wasn’t check his legs, it was to reach up and feel his face. He needed to know if his face was still there, and it was.

The second thing he understood was that his legs weren’t. A third Marine on the team, Staff Sergeant Eric Chear, took shrapnel everywhere. Daniel took the blast wave. No obvious wounds, no blood on his uniform, just a brain injury his body hadn’t caught up with yet. That’s the cruelty of this kind of war. The thing that takes your legs leaves them in pieces in the field.

The thing that takes your friend leaves him looking like he’s just resting. Joey was bleeding out. He had tourniquets on every limb. He understood in that moment that he was probably going to die. So, he asked another Marine to kneel down beside him in the dirt. He asked him to pray the Lord’s Prayer with him out loud.

He thought about his son who was waiting back home, about Meg, about his parents. He asked the Marine to make sure they all knew he had been thinking of them at the end. Then they got him on the helicopter. They put Daniel Greer on the same helicopter. Before they put him on, he managed to get one thing out to his squad leader. He apologized.

He said that he was sorry he had let them down. A man with minutes left in his life, a father about to leave his son, a husband about to leave a wife, and the only thing he could think to say was sorry. Sorry he wouldn’t be there for his Marines tomorrow. That sentence tells you everything about who Daniel Greer was, and it tells you everything about what Joey Jones was about to inherit.

He woke up two days later in an Army hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. They yanked a breathing tube out of his throat. He couldn’t talk. He could barely think, but the first question he tried to form wasn’t about his body. It was about Daniel. He needed to know if his friend had made it. What Joey didn’t know yet was that Daniel was in another room a few doors down.

A chaplain was already there. Daniel’s family was already there, and they were saying goodbye. A nurse Joey had never met in his life walked over to his bed. She wet his cracked lips with a sponge. She wiped his forehead, and she looked him in the eye. And she didn’t answer his question. She told him both of his legs were gone above the knee.

Then she told him not to worry. He was going to walk again. He asked about his friend. She answered about his future. That was no accident. That was not a nurse getting confused under pressure. That is a complete stranger making the most important call of his life in real time. Because she understood something most people would have never caught.

If she had told him that Daniel was dying because of him, that guilt wouldn’t have been a feeling. It would have been a wall. A wall he may never have gotten over. He might have never got on prosthetics. He may never walk out of that hospital. He’d lay in that bed and maybe quit. So, she lied. Not about the legs, about the priority.

She gave him a future to hold on to first. The truth could come later. Hope had to come now. That’s the most quietly heroic thing in this entire story. A nurse with no authority to promise anything made a triage decision about a man’s soul, not just his body. She saved his life a second time, and she did it with a sentence.

That sentence became the load-bearing wall of everything that came after. They flew him to Walter Reed in Bethesda. Nearly a year of recovery is what laid ahead of him. Surgeons reattached muscles in places they were never meant to live. There was phantom pain. Pain in legs that no longer existed. It felt like someone twisting a foot off a body that he didn’t have anymore.

Here’s the most relatable detail on the whole story. Every time the lunch tray came, he kicked everyone out of his room. Family, friends, visitors, get out. He gave himself 20 minutes alone with that tray. He cried, he cussed, he yelled at God and the devil at the same time. He let it all out where nobody could see him. Then he wiped his face, opened the door, and he let everyone back in.

His father had taught him a long time ago that a man’s job is to provide and protect. Joey couldn’t carry a rifle anymore. He couldn’t run a patrol, but he had a son waiting at home. He could still carry the people who loved him. He could still protect them from the worst of what he was feeling. And so he did.

While he was still at Walter Reed, he started a peer support program for Marines coming in behind him. Men and women who had just lost what he had lost. He had hardly gone back to work. Don’t forget to drop a like before we keep going. It’s how more people end up watching stories like this one.

Within a year of losing both of his legs, he enrolled at Georgetown University. He graduated in 2014. He went straight to Capitol Hill and took work with House He went straight to Capitol Hill and took work with the House Veterans Affairs Committee. He helped push through real policy changes. One of them let severely wounded service members stay on active duty in their critical skill jobs.

The kid from Dalton was now writing the rules. Then 2012 brought a wound he couldn’t see. His childhood best friend, also a Marine, took his own life. PTSD. The war had followed him home and won. Joey stopped seeing veterans issues as work. He started seeing them as family. In 2019, Fox News brought him on as a contributor.

The original idea was simple. Let him talk about veterans issues. But within a couple of years, he was substitute hosting Fox and Friends weekend shows, primetime. He hosts Fox Nation Outdoors. He has written two number one New York Times bestsellers. He sits on the board of the Boot Campaign. The group helps veterans claw their way out of post-traumatic stress, brain injuries, addiction, and chronic pain.

He runs Purple Heart Retreats with the Warrior Bonfire Program. He stays close with Stacy Greer, Daniel’s widow. Daniel’s son is growing up without a father because of a five-day operation in Safar Bazaar. He is the same age as Joey’s own son. He doesn’t talk about any of this like a job. He talks about it like a debt because that’s what it is. Every August 6th, he throws a party.

He calls it his alive day. He celebrates it like a birthday. Family, friends, music, food. Most people treat the worst day of their life as maybe a day to avoid. He treats it as a day to thank. He understands something most people never figure out. He didn’t earn that second life, other people did. Daniel made the choice to be there.

The nurse made the call to lie. His parents had built the man who had survived it. The Marines on the ground may have carried him out alive, and Meg at 18 let him walk through her door. His job every day from now on is to be worth what they paid for him. He had one job as a Marine in his 20s, walk toward the bomb.

The bomb won the fight on August 6th, 2010. It took both legs. It tore his right arm to ribbons, and it took the friend who had woken him up that morning, but it never took the job. He is not walking on prosthetics, he is walking on a fireman’s sacrifice, on a nurse’s lie, on a girl’s smile, on his father’s code.

The metal is the easy part. Most men spend their whole lives trying to convince themselves they made it on their own. Joey Jones spent his whole life building a stage to thank the people who made it for him.

QQ4 Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The friendship began on a live television program in November of 1986 in the 11 seconds after Bob Dylan called Keith Richards music derivative on camera. Keith Richard’s response to that assessment, one sentence said without anger, without performance, with the specific directness of a man who has nothing to prove and knows it made Bob Dylan laugh.

Then made Bob Dylan go quiet. then made Bob Dylan say two words that people who know Bob Dylan say he almost never said to anyone. This is the story of those 11 seconds and the 40 years that followed them. The program was a live music interview special broadcast on an American network on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The format was simple.

Two musicians, a host, an hour of conversation about music and the state of it. The producers had assembled the pairing of Bob Dylan and Keith Richards with the specific calculation of television producers who understand that two people with equally strong and potentially incompatible views about what music is and what it should do will produce better television than two people who agree about everything.

The calculation was correct, though not in the way the producers had anticipated. Bob Dylan was 45 years old in November of 1986. Bob Dylan had released Empire Burlesque the previous year and had been on the road for most of the intervening period as part of the True Confessions tour with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers.

Bob Dylan was in November of 1986 in one of the most prolific and restless phases of a career that had consisted almost entirely of prolific and restless phases. A career that had moved through folk, rock, country, gospel, and back again, that had been declared finished at least six times by the music press, and at each time continued with the serene indifference of a river to the opinions of people standing on its banks.

Bob Dylan had been redefining what music could be. Since 1962, Bob Dylan had invented and reinvented himself so many times that reinvention had become his defining characteristic, not in the superficial sense of a performer changing costumes, but in the deeper sense of a musician who had never allowed his work to settle into a form that could be anticipated or categorized from the outside.

Bob Dylan understood influence and originality and the relationship between them better than almost anyone alive in 1986. Bob Dylan had spent 24 years thinking carefully and specifically about where music came from and where music was going and what it meant that those two things were always in constant conversation with each other.

Keith Richards was 42 years old in November of 1986. Keith Richards had been playing guitar professionally since 1962. Keith Richards had built a career on a foundation of American blues and rhythm and blues. A foundation that Keith Richards had studied with the systematic devotion of someone who understood that the tradition he was building on was not incidental to the music he was making, but essential to it.

that you could not understand what Keith Richards did without understanding where Keith Richards had come from and what Keith Richards had been listening to since he was a teenager in Dartford with American Import Records and a secondhand guitar and no teacher except the recordings themselves. Keith Richards had never pretended otherwise. Keith Richards had in fact spent considerable energy across his career making the lineage explicit, naming the artists, citing the recordings, insisting on the acknowledgement of influence that the mainstream music

industry had a long history of suppressing or ignoring or crediting to the wrong people. If anything, Keith Richards was more transparent about his sources than most musicians of his generation. Keith Richards had always said openly that the Rolling Stones came directly from the blues, that Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson and the specific tradition of the Mississippi Delta were not background influences, but foundational ones.

The music Keith Richards made was in direct and sustained conversation with that tradition, something Keith Richards considered not a limitation, but a responsibility and a form of respect. The interview had been running for 8 minutes when the host asked Bob Dylan about the current state of rock and roll.

Bob Dylan answered with the density and the indirection that characterized Bob Dylan’s responses to direct questions, turning the question over, approaching it from an unexpected angle, finding his way to what he actually thought through a series of observations that moved like a river rather than a road. Bob Dylan was not a straightforward interview subject.

Bob Dylan had been asked about rock and roll in hundreds of interviews across 24 years and had developed the habit of treating the question as an invitation to think out loud rather than a request for a prepared position. The producer Gerald Sherman said afterward that in the first 8 minutes of the interview, he had been slightly anxious, not because anything was going wrong, but because nothing was going anywhere in particular yet.

The interview had the feeling of two conversations happening simultaneously. Bob Dylan’s internal one and the external one visible to the cameras. And Gerald Sherman was not certain in those first eight minutes that the two conversations would converge into something. Bob Dylan talked about influence. Bob Dylan talked about originality.

Bob Dylan talked about the difference between music that absorbed a tradition and transformed it and music that absorbed a tradition and reproduced it. And then Bob Dylan made his assessment. And then Bob Dylan said with the precision of a man making a musical assessment rather than a personal judgment that the Rolling Stones work, and Bob Dylan was specific, naming Keith Richards as the guitarist whose approach he was discussing was derivative in a way that Bob Dylan found limiting.

Bob Dylan said it without hostility. Bob Dylan said it as a technical observation about the relationship between source material and the work that came from it. Bob Dylan said that Keith Richards played the blues the way the blues had already been played, rather than using the blues as a starting point for something that had not yet been played.

Keith Richards had been listening to this with the specific attention Keith Richards gave to things being said about music by people who knew music. Keith Richards did not interrupt. Keith Richards did not shift in his chair or display any of the visible signals of a person preparing a defensive response. Keith Richards listened to Bob Dylan’s complete observation all the way to its conclusion without interrupting and without displaying any visible signal of preparing a response.

Then Keith Richards said one sentence. The sentence was not a rebuttal. The sentence did not defend Keith Richards music or argue for its originality or challenge Bob Dylan’s characterization of what the blues meant in the context of rock and roll. The sentence was something else entirely, something that required a specific kind of confidence to say.

The confidence of a person who has spent long enough thinking about the same things as the person they are talking to that they can locate the exact point where their thinking diverges and say something useful about that point rather than simply defending their own position. The sentence acknowledged everything Bob Dylan had said, the assessment, the distinction Bob Dylan was drawing, the specific musical concern underlying the observation, and then turned it 90°.

Keith Richards took Bob Dylan’s own framework, the one Bob Dylan had used to analyze Keith Richards relationship to the blues tradition, and applied it back to Bob Dylan’s work with the same precision Bob Dylan had used to apply it to Keith Richards. Spare aimed. The sentence asked Bob Dylan something about Bob Dylan’s own music, about the relationship between Bob Dylan’s sources and Bob Dylan’s output that Bob Dylan had not been asked on television before.

The sentence did not attack. The sentence illuminated. Bob Dylan laughed. The laugh was not the polite laugh of someone responding to a joke. The laugh was the involuntary laugh of someone who has been genuinely surprised. The specific kind of surprise that a person of exceptional intelligence experiences when someone else’s intelligence exceeds their expectations.

Bob Dylan laughed for 4 seconds. Then Bob Dylan stopped laughing. Then Bob Dylan was quiet for 3 seconds in the way that Bob Dylan was quiet when Bob Dylan was thinking rather than performing thought. Then Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” The producer in the booth, a man named Gerald Sherman, who had been working in television for 14 years, said afterward that in 14 years of live television production, he had never heard Bob Dylan say those two words in a public forum.

Gerald Sherman said he had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions and had observed Bob Dylan in numerous other contexts and that you’re right was not a phrase that Bob Dylan deployed easily or often because Bob Dylan had spent 24 years being right about music in ways that other people eventually caught up with. And the experience of being right ahead of everyone else does not generally produce a man who says you’re right readily when someone else makes a point.

The host of the program, a journalist named Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said afterward that the 11 seconds between Bob Dylan’s assessment and Bob Dylan saying, “You’re right,” were the most extraordinary 11 seconds of television she had been present for. Patricia Wells said that what she witnessed in those 11 seconds was not a debate or a confrontation or a celebrity exchange of competing opinions.

Patricia Wells said what she witnessed was one musician recognizing another musician as an equal, which was in the specific context of Bob Dylan in 1986, not something that happened in public very often. The interview continued for another 42 minutes after those 11 seconds. The conversation between Bob Dylan and Keith Richards in the remaining 42 minutes was described by everyone who watched it as fundamentally different from the first 8 minutes.

The host, Patricia Wells, who had been conducting music interviews for 12 years and understood the difference between the performance of conversation and actual conversation, said that at approximately the 9-minute mark, something shifted in the studio. That the formal interview, architecture dissolved, and what replaced it was something less structured and more genuine.

Bob Dylan and Keith Richards talked about influence and originality and the blues and what it meant to build on a tradition without being consumed by it. They talked about specific recordings and specific musicians with the specificity of two people who had spent their entire adult lives thinking about these things and rarely found another person who had thought about them with equivalent care.

They talked about where music came from and where music was going and whether those two questions were actually one question or two. Patricia Wells said afterward that she had asked approximately four questions in the remaining 42 minutes because Bob Dylan and Keith Richards did not require questions. They required only a room and a camera and the shared understanding that what they were saying together was worth recording carefully.

She said it was the best interview she had ever conducted and that she had conducted the smallest part of it. After the program, Bob Dylan and Keith Richards were in the corridor outside the studio when the host Patricia Wells passed them. Patricia Wells said she did not stop because she did not want to interrupt.

She observed them for approximately 30 seconds from a distance. She said they were talking with the ease of people who had known each other for years rather than people who had met for the first time 2 hours earlier. She said that something had shifted between them during the broadcast that the broadcast had made permanent rather than temporary.

She continued down the corridor and did not look back. She said in her account of that evening that she had decided in that moment not to interrupt the conversation because some conversations are more valuable than any question a journalist might ask and that the conversation she had observed for 30 seconds in the corridor outside the studio was one of them.

She had been a music journalist for 12 years. She recognized the difference. Bob Dylan and Keith Richards have maintained their friendship across four decades. They have appeared together at various events, most significantly at the concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995, where people who were present described them as inseparable for most of the evening, occupying the same corner of the backstage area and talking with the concentrated attention of people who only have a limited amount of time together and intend to use it

well. Bob Dylan has spoken about Keith Richards in interviews with the specific thoughtful care that Bob Dylan reserves for musicians whose work Bob Dylan considers genuinely important rather than merely culturally prominent. Keith Richards has spoken about Bob Dylan in similar terms with the specific respect of someone who recognizes in another person a commitment to music that goes deeper than career.

Neither Bob Dylan nor Keith Richards has made a public statement specifically about how the friendship began or about the November 1986 interview. Bob Dylan has not mentioned the 11 seconds. Keith Richards has not mentioned the sentence. The interview exists in the archive. The 11 seconds are there. The laugh is there. The two words are there.

What is also there for anyone who watches the interview from its beginning and pays attention to the shift that happens at the 9-minute mark is the specific moment when two people who thought they were appearing on a television program discovered they were actually talking to each other. What Keith Richards said in that one sentence has never been officially reported.

The people who were in the studio that evening, Gerald Sherman, Patricia Wells, the floor crew, the two camera operators, the makeup artist who was watching from the side of the set, have described the sentence in consistent terms. They have described its effect. They have described Bob Dylan’s laugh and Bob Dylan’s silence and Bob Dylan’s two words.

They have not repeated the sentence itself in the specific understanding that the sentence was said between two musicians on a television program and that its power resided in the specific context of that exchange and would not survive removal from it intact. What can be said is this. Keith Richards said something to Bob Dylan about Bob Dylan’s music that used Bob Dylan’s own observation about Keith Richards as its starting point and arrived somewhere that Bob Dylan had not anticipated.

Keith Richards turned Bob Dylan’s assessment 90° and showed Bob Dylan something about the music they had both spent their lives making that Bob Dylan recognized immediately as true. And Bob Dylan said, “You’re right.” Two words said by Bob Dylan in public on live television in 1986 to Keith Richards in response to a single sentence Keith Richards had said about music.

Two words that Gerald Sherman, who had worked with Bob Dylan on two previous occasions, said he had never heard Bob Dylan say in a public forum. Two words that Patricia Wells, who had been interviewing musicians for 12 years, said were the most significant two words she had heard in those 12 years. Not because of their content, but because of who said them and what it cost to say them and what it meant that Keith Richards had produced them in 11 seconds from a conversation that began with Bob Dylan calling Keith Richards’s music derivative. And Keith Richards and

Bob Dylan have been close friends for nearly 40 years. The sentence did its work in 11 seconds on the evening of November 3rd, 1986. The work has been ongoing ever since. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below. Have you ever said something to someone that turned a potential disagreement into an unexpected and lasting connection? Tell us about it in the comments below.

Share this with someone who needs to be reminded that the right sentence said at the right moment can completely change the entire direction of a relationship. Ring the notification bell for more untold stories about the extraordinary human beings behind music’s greatest legends.