SEND ME

A portrait of a brilliant warrior and her unlikely path to the front line.

Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent was one of the “one percent of the one percent,” the truly special operators who are the backbone and brains of the U.S. Special Operations Command. A gifted linguist who mastered French in a month and had a keen ear for the nuances of Arabic dialects, Kent was also skilled at cryptography and at supporting efforts to “Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, Disseminate,” with the “fix” part of the doctrine involving no small amount of lethality. She also had a charm that enabled her to sway unsteady allies into doing what they needed to do, though some tricky negotiations were involved, as with one sheikh who wanted to keep his militia, likely Islamic State supporters, close at hand. After all, write Skovlund and Joe Kent, Shannon’s widower and former Army Ranger and Green Beret, “being a militant was probably the most stable profession a young man could have in this part of the world.” Like many service members, Shannon enlisted after 9/11; unusually, she advocated both for women in special operations—an idea that “was outrageous to most at the time, especially among the rank and file”—and for fellow warriors who needed help, proving that, as the authors note, with the right training she might have made an exceptional clinical psychologist: “She would know what they were going through because she’d already gone through it.” Shannon was killed in action in 2019 in Syria, along with two other Americans and a civilian interpreter, victims of an IS suicide bomber. It is some consolation and no spoiler to note that the planners of that attack were, yes, fixed.

Patriotism without jingoism, and a sensitive look at an exceptional life of service.