The mother-of-two special operator killed hunting ISIS: Navy cryptologist ... trends now
Joe Kent was on a classified mission overseas when a friend pulled him aside to say four Americans had been killed in a suicide bombing in Syria.
Two of them were women, and Kent knew deep down that one of them was his wife Shannon.
The Navy cryptologist had been hunting ISIS cells and their leaders in Manbij - when a man walked into a popular kebab restaurant frequented by U.S. personnel and detonated his suicide vest.
The mother of two young boys was 35 years old, and killed while working alongside the nation's most secretive intelligence office, the National Security Agency, to track down terrorists.
Even her husband didn't know the full details of the work she was doing or exactly where she was.
Navy cryptologist Shannon Kent had been tracking down ISIS cells and their leaders in Manbij - when a man walked into a popular kebab restaurant frequented by U.S. personnel and detonated his suicide vest
Over five overseas combat tours she became an expert in gleaning information from almost anyone.
She was responsible for finding militants to give their locations to Delta Force, SEAL Team 6 or pilots so they could be taken out with precision strikes.
Chief Kent wasn’t going for a leisurely lunch when the fireball ripped through the dining room in January 2019.
'I love you,' Joe texted her when she informed in she was going out on a mission in what would be their final exchange.
She was doing what she had done for most of her storied 15-year career: Gathering intelligence in the world’s most dangerous places.
The Islamic State claimed credit for the attack and she became the first female service member to be killed in Syria since American troops arrived in 2015.
Kent suddenly became a Gold Star husband, had the impossible task of returning home to his two sons.
At just one and three years old, they were too young to fully grasp what had happened. They had barely gotten to know their warrior mother.
Like other grieving families, he didn’t have a stranger knock on his door to deliver the unbearable news.
He then contacted Shannon’s parents to make sure they got the worst phone call imaginable from someone they knew.
The mother of two young boys was 35 years old, and killed while working at the highest, shadowy level of U.S. Special Operations
Kent became a Gold Star husband, had the impossible task of returning home to his two sons. They were only one and three years old at the time, and still too young to fully grasp what had happened
Then he had to get out of the middle of nowhere and return home to face his new normal.
His wife’s heroic story and how Kent dealt with her death in is in her biography Send Me: The True Story of a Mother at War, co-written by journalist and filmmaker Marty Skovlund Jr.
Her legacy and reputation was made abundantly clear by the thousands who showed up to her memorial at the Naval Academy’s chapel in Annapolis, Maryland.
She was posthumously promoted to senior chief petty officer.
The five medals and citations she received described her Special Operations work supporting the NSA while assigned to Cryptologic Warfare Activity SIXTY SIX.
Her name was added to the Cryptologic Memorial Wall alongside the inscribed words ‘They Served in Silence’.
Chief Kent was fluent in seven languages and was the first woman to complete the Naval Special Warfare Direct Support Course.
Shannon's heroic story and how he dealt with her death in is in her biography Send Me: The True Story of a Mother at War , co-written by journalist and filmmaker Marty Skovlund Jr.
She also ran marathons, could march for miles with a 50-pound rucksack and do a dozen pull-ups.
Shannon even had a bout with thyroid cancer.
She didn’t tell Joe, who was overseas at the time, until after the surgery and was back at work a few days later.
She learned four Arabic dialects so she could be at the heart of the post-9/11 wars.
Her skills took her into meetings with sources who knew the whereabouts of some of the world’s most wanted terrorists, including ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
Some of the men she came face-to-face with even balked at the fact she was a woman.
But she was still able to extract exactly what was needed.
Her work was so classified that she was given the title of ‘cryptologist’, and the full details of what she was doing may not be known for years.
Cryptologic warfare 'encompasses signals intelligence (SIGINT), cyberspace operations, and electronic warfare (EW) operations in order to deliver effects through sea, air, land, space, and cyber domains at all levels of war,' according to the Navy.
But her work was much more than translating documents or decrypting messages
Growing up in the small town of Pine Planes, in New York, she rode horses at an early age.
Her knack for languages came when she learned Spanish so she could speak to Argentinian stable hands at a polo field.
She enlisted for the Navy in 2003 inspired by her state troop father and Staten Island firefighter uncle, both of whom were responders when the planes struck the twin towers on September 11, 2001.
In 2004 she graduated from boot camp at Recruit Training Command in Great Lakes, Illinois, in February 2004 and joined the Navy's linguist program.
After serving on four combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kent voluntarily deployed to Syria at the Navy's request late last year. She was killed in the suicide attack by ISIS two months later. The cryptologic technician is pictured above during her first tour in Iraq in 2007
Her rise through the military ranks was rapid and in 2007 she was picked for a team supporting Navy SEALs doing nightly raids in Iraq.
She served with the Navy Information Operations Command in Fort Gordon, Georgia; the Navy Special Warfare Support Activity 2 in Norfolk, Virginia; the Personnel Resource Development Office in Washington, DC, and the Navy Information Operations Command at Fort George Meade.
She also completed deployments in Afghanistan, before she met Green Beret Joe during training in 2013 when they were set up by a friend.
They got married the next Christmas Eve, bought a house in Maryland and Shannon decided it was time to start a family.
Kent says he still wakes up every day thinking about avenging his wife’s death.
He spent 20 years in the Special Forces with 11 combat deployments under his belt as a Green Beret.
Shannon's legacy and reputation was made abundantly clear by the thousands who showed up to her memorial at the Naval Academy’s chapel in Annapolis, Maryland
But he knows he can’t get payback. He would never abandon sons Colten and Josh.
‘I could make my kids orphans, so it has never been an option. But I do think about it all the time,' he told DailyMail.com.
‘There’s an entire military apparatus that’s going to take care of the guys that killed her. And I’m confident they did.’
Ten months after the blast that took Shannon away, al-Baghdadi killed himself and his two children with a suicide vest when U.S. forces approached his home in Syria.
Even though Shannon was serving with the most elite forces in the world, she still didn’t get full recognition.
She wished she could have said she was a member of a Special
