‘If life doesn’t feel difficult, you’re probably not living’

Fox News contributor Johnny Joey Jones’ first book spent eight weeks on The New York Times Best Sellers list — yet he was shocked when his latest debuted at No. 1.

“It was quite a surprise for me,” the former Marine Corps bomb technician tells The Post.

“Unfortunately, there was a war that broke out the week we decided to release the book, and so my job trumped my promotion of the book. I had a lot of shows scheduled here at Fox and other interviews for the book and had to work on covering the war,” he explains.

“You don’t want to go from ‘Israel dropped bombs today’ or ‘Iran fired rockets’ to ‘And check out my new book!’”

So seeing “the energy around the book” has been “really reassuring and fulfilling.”

This weekend saw the tome atop the hardcover-nonfiction list for the third straight week.

In “Behind the Badge: Answering the Call to Serve on America’s Homefront,” Jones talks to “nine first responders who’ve all had an impact on my life” — most “lifelong friends, some family, and all of them heroes to me” — to get a “raw, unfiltered look into the duty they fulfill and the burden they carry,” as he writes.

He had the idea for it about as soon as he turned in his first book, 2023’s “Unbroken Bonds of Battle: A Modern Warriors Book of Heroism, Patriotism, and Friendship.” That one focused on veterans.

Yes, Joey Jones has written two books centered on other people — when his own story could easily fill hundreds of pages.

Jones will celebrate his 15th Alive Day next month.

Working as a Marine bomb tech in Safar Bazaar, Afghanistan, Aug. 6, 2010, he stepped on an improvised explosive device the Taliban left.

It killed his buddy Cpl. Daniel Greer. Jones, just 24 and a new father, lost both his legs. He wears prosthetics.

“If life doesn’t feel difficult, you’re probably not living,” he says.

“We all have something. I don’t know what it’s like to have cancer or at least to know it,” he continues.

“People lose their business, they lose their marriage, they lose a child. These things feel insurmountable, yet people do those things, and they continue on with their life, and they rebuild their life, and they find happiness again. So it’s kind of hard for me to sit around and say, ‘Well, I shouldn’t or I can’t,’ because I see people do it every day. My inspiration are the people in this country that I fought to protect because I just know it’s not easy, and they do it anyway. Sure, yeah, the legs are uncomfortable and at times painful, and it’s frustrating when you’ve worked all day, and all your friends are going out for a drink, but, hey, I have to take time off my legs so I can’t go. But you learn to enjoy the time. You do have appreciate it a little bit more and just be happy that for most of the day you’re up on two legs walking.”

Being on those two legs, with all its challenges, is a decision — Jones could have stayed in a wheelchair.

“I say this with a little bit of reservation because there are those that don’t have the choice of a normal chair and may not agree or understand what I’m about to say, but I made the choice early on that when I walked into a room, I wanted to look people in the eye, if that was an option, and that’s how I’ve chose to live my life. There are people that say, ‘We forgot that you don’t have legs.’ And, well, that’s kind of the point,” he says.

“So all the way from wearing suit pants now instead of shorts to trying to overcome physical obstacles when they’re put in front of me without complaining, if I don’t want to be defined by my legs,” then “I can’t use them as an excuse every time I’m asked to do something I don’t like to do. Or when a wheelchair might be easier.”

A decade and a half after the accident that changed his life, it’s truly a milestone time for Jones, who lives with his wife and two kids on a Georgia farm but spends a lot of time in New York City.

And pivoting from promoting his book wasn’t the only change in plans he’s had to make.

When Donald Trump named “Fox & Friends” weekend co-host and ex-Army National Guard officer Pete Hegseth his defense-secretary nominee, Jones had to drop everything to stand in for him at the last minute. It must have been quite the moment.

Jones chuckles. “I was more so bummed because I had to miss out on the hunting trip I had planned all year. And I ended up having to miss out on all my hunting trips to fill in for Pete. But it was an honor to do it,” he says.

“I was hosting a gala for Tunnel to Towers a few years ago, and some of the executives from Fox were there, and I made the joke that I plan to make, which is that I’ve made a career out of filling in for Pete Hegseth. And then this year, that came to fruition in a larger sense than I realized.”

The “good friends” still talk. “We don’t talk about work because everybody, I’m sure, wants to talk to him about work,” Jones says. “I’ll send him a meme or something and try to remind him that he’s still one of us.”

Jones is an avid hunter who did a series on the subject for Fox Nation.

“For me, the most fun way to hunt is to hunt with your friends. And a lot of big-game hunting is about stealth. So you’ve got to be quiet. You can’t talk. So the majority of hunting I do is bird hunting, like duck hunting. You can pile as many guys in there as you want to, and until you see ducks, you don’t have to be quiet,” he says.

“So it’s social, and that’s what I like. And with my visibility, both with Fox News and my injury, I get offered a lot of fun hunts, and it’s a way to share that with the guys that have done way more than me that don’t have the same peacock personality.”

And he knows his stuff. “Those ducks up in Canada — before they migrate south, they are fluffy and fat, and they don’t fly as much,” he said when this writer mentioned being from Alberta.

“If you’re a big duck hunter, on your bucket list is an early-season Canada hunt. A mallard duck will be twice the size in Canada at the beginning of the season than it will be in Arkansas or Texas at the end of season.”

Even so, he says, “if we go kill a dozen ducks, we’re going to eat eight to 10 of them.”

He’s gone hunting with some of the people profiled in “Behind the Badge”; the book has a picture of game warden Jeremy Judd carrying him on one trip.

Judd was called into a 2011 search team to find a suicidal police officer — and ended up being the one to shoot him when he pointed his gun at the team and refused to drop it.

Such fatalities can haunt first responders for years.

Jones knew the subjects and their stories before writing the book but still learned something important in the process.

“In this country, we have Memorial Day and Veterans Day,” he says.

“There are several holidays throughout the year oriented towards either war or military service, and in that has been this 20-year growth where the country has accepted that veterans have mental health resulting from their time in service. Society has accepted their own culpability in it. Hey, we ask you to go to war for us, and that hurt you that way, and we have a responsibility to help you get better. We have everything from veterans’ courts and local municipalities to the Department of Veterans Affairs, so from a local level to the national level to a corporate level — Applebee’s would give me a free meal on Veterans Day — there’s this acknowledgment and call to action for veterans’ mental health.

“Then you look at first responders. And name an organization that’s nationally active, name a department of the government that works to support their mental health. None of that exists. It’s still very much in the precinct, in the fire hall, on the SWAT team, at the Border Patrol outpost. It’s very much just peer to peer.”

Jones hopes his book can help change that.

“We expect the same level of perfection from them, and they’re all governed by the Constitution, so there is a federal interest in their mental health,” he says.