Jason Slabbaert was a young volunteer firefighter when his pager went off for a car fire across the field from his apartment. It was a high-end BMW, abandoned in a rural lot and burning hardest at the trunk. It looked like a strip-and-burn job. He forced the trunk open with a Halligan bar and pulled at what looked like a rolled-up carpet.
“It was charred and heavy, heavy in a way that stopped me cold,” he writes in Lawdog, his memoir published by Writers of the West.
It was a body. That call happened decades ago, and it still comes back. “Even now, all these years later, I can be sitting at a backyard cookout, laughing with friends over a plate of barbecued chicken, and suddenly I’m back there.”
That is what the book is about. Slabbaert spent 30 years as a first responder in the Houston area, first as a firefighter, then as a bounty hunter and finally as a deputy. The foreword opens with the line that sums it up: “Nobody warned me that the hardest part of this job wouldn’t be the calls. It would be what the calls left behind.”
He doesn’t pretend he handled it well. Like most first responders, he filed things away and showed up for the next shift. Later in his career he was badly bitten by a K-9 during a call. Most of his unit stayed silent: “No check-ins. No ‘How are you doing?’ Nothing.” After that, being near a K-9 unit set off “stress, anxiety, flashbacks. It became part of the PTSD I carried.”
The last chapter is the most useful part for anyone in uniform. His advice is to find peace outside the badge, whether that’s a hobby, a porch at sunrise or a quiet cup of coffee. Then check on each other. “We see each other. Truly see each other. And that has saved more lives than any policy or training or piece of equipment ever could.”
If you’re a firefighter, cop, EMT or dispatcher, or you love one, Lawdog says plainly what a lot of people in those jobs never say out loud.
Book Details
Title: Lawdog
Author: Jason Slabbaert
Publisher: Writers of the West
Release Date: September 30, 2026
ASIN: B0HLLRH1GX
Print Length: 231 pages
Language: English
Genre: Biography & Memoir: Law Enforcement, First Responder Memoir
Formats: Kindle, Paperback, Hardcover
Available on: Amazon
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