The mother-of-two special operator killed hunting ISIS: Navy cryptologist Shannon Kent's husband tells the story of a warrior in a top secret unit taken away from her sons by a suicide bomber in Syria

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.

Shannon's 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. She is pictured in one of her final photos 

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

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

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 Operations Unit.

‘She would say to me “everywhere I go, even in the military and the intelligence world, I to take five minutes to explain to people who I am and what I've done.”’

She would also get frustrated that people may not believe her, because she was a woman.

It’s a sign that for many years women have been doing military jobs as dangerous as those of men.

In Shannon’s position, she was in situations where she was at far greater risk than many of her male counterparts.

Her work wasn't behind a desk, she was in the field wearing a body armor and carrying a M4 rifle. 

She didn't wear a uniform on high-level missions and sometimes had a support team of just a handful of men and an interpreter. 

Her work was almost always clandestine.

But she was also an adoring mother and host who wanted to make as many memories as she could for her family.

A talented artist, she decorated their home and designed their table as a mosaic so it would be the centerpiece of their home.

Every Thanksgiving, she would invite friends who lived far away from their families to make sure they weren’t alone.

Some of the guests were Iraqi and had just recently emigrated to the U.S., so they would eat a fusion of Middle Eastern and traditional Holiday food.

Kent hailed from Pine Plains, New York, and enlisted in the Navy in 2003. She has been remembered by loved ones as a wife and mother of two young twin boys, a cancer survivor, marathon runner, Congressional lobbyist and - above all - an American patriot

‘It was like a uniquely Shannon thing that she created an Arabic Thanksgiving,’ Kent says.

Kent believes it is important to tell her story not just for their children, but for the many other women who serve in Special Operations.

It was both a blessing and a curse for Kent that his sons were just one and three when their mother died, he says.

‘They don't really remember their mom and they didn't get to know her. They were so young they couldn't truly understand.

‘I did everything I could to try and make their life as seamless as possible.’

So he moved back home to the Pacific Northwest to be closer to his family, and a year later he found someone who stepped in and filled the role as their mom.

‘We've made Shannon a part of their daily rituals.

‘We talk about her all the time. They're more familiar with death than I think a lot of adults are, because it's part of our family story.’

Now six and eight years old, they ask their father questions about and catch him off guard all the time. 

But they have dealt with her death almost all of their lives.

Now Kent has tried to find a new mission, by getting involved in his community and politics.

In 2022 he ran as a Republican in Washington state’s 3rd Congressional District and was defeated.

He is running again in 2024 and is vocal with his criticism of today’s military, and fears the U.S. is continuing down the path of seemingly endless wars.

‘The biggest problem is that our political and military leaders have lost a lot of credibility.

‘The War on Terror started out under righteous premises: We had to go out and get the guys behind 9/11.

‘But we quickly deviated into nation building. Who benefited from that?

‘It was really just the military industrial complex, even when every indicator on the ground said this wasn't effective.

‘We doubled down and invaded Iraq based on lies. I spent a lot of time on the ground in Iraq and realized, it wasn't that our policy makers necessarily got it wrong. They really just didn't care.

‘War's a big business and they want to keep it going.’

His wife was killed a month after then-President Donald Trump vowed to get American troops out of Syria.

When Kent went to Dover Air Force Base as his wife’s remains were returned to U.S. soil, Trump was there to meet him.

‘I’m so sorry for your loss. Shannon was an amazing woman and warrior,’ Trump said to Kent.

The grieving husband and father could tell the commander-in-chief was deeply torn about keeping an American military presence in Syria.

The president put his hand on Kent’s shoulder and added: ‘Shannon was the real deal, we are lucky to have people like her willing to go out there and face evil for us.’

Kent is worried that the U.S. is going to fall into the same ‘traps’ again, with the recent surge in violence in the Middle East.

He doesn’t want U.S. troops getting shot at at ‘random outposts’.

‘I think it’s incredibly frustrating and tragic that we just had three Americans killed defending the tribal border region of Iraq, Syria, and Jordan.

‘They have no business there whatsoever other than the service targets for our enemies.

‘I think we need to get serious and really think about how we do national security without fighting endless wars.’

‘At the end of the day, it's not in our vital national security interests. We can't be the world's policemen. We most certainly can't be the policemen of, of the Middle East.’

He also wants Chief Kent’s story to serve as inspiration to veterans across the country trying to transition to civilian life.

Shannon wasn’t even supposed to be in Syria when she was killed. 

She was due to begin a clinical psychology doctoral program near Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Her goal was to use her years of experience in intelligence and Special Operations to help veterans suffering from PTSD.

But her bout with cancer and red tape in the Navy meant she couldn’t enroll. 

She tried everything to get in, even raising her concerns to senior levels of the Pentagon and going to members of Congress.

But no changes were made.

While she was in the process of lobbying Capitol Hill, Kent voluntarily deployed to Syria at the Navy's request in late 2018.

She went on her fifth combat deployment despite having two young children at home.

As a warrior, her duty was still at the forefront of her mind. 

Even though family was important, nothing would hold her back from the mission.

Two months later she walked into the restaurant when the suicide blast went off.

More than a dozen others were killed during that attack, including three Americans: Army Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jonathan R Farmer, 37, of Boynton Beach, Florida, who was based at Fort Campbell, Kentucky; a civilian, Scott A Wirtz, from St Louis, Missouri, and a civilian contractor.

After Kent's death, the Navy instituted a new policy aimed at improving 'the quality, fairness, and consistency of the medical waiver process for all enlisted to officer commissioning programs'.

It was progress, but the government still lags behind in care for service members past and present.

Veterans of the post-9/11 wars have been at the heart of the struggle to get the proper care they need to deal with the lasting physical and psychological impacts of their deployments.

‘I still view myself as a professional warrior and that's who I was for most of my adult life,’ Kent says.

‘I know a lot of guys who did what I did. They served multiple combat deployments and that was their life.

‘A lot of them don't end up having relationships with their kids.

‘In losing Shannon, I was kind of given clarity that there was no other option but to put my kids first.

‘I really just kind of wanted to convey the overall stress that military lifestyle has on families.

‘My peers might take a step back and look, and see what they're going to be left with when they leave the service.

‘Maybe a couple deployments is enough. Maybe that is a good time to step aside and put your family first while you still can.

‘Until you're forced to make that decision, or until maybe you don't come home from one of these trips’.

Send Me: The True Story of a Mother at War by Joe Kent and Marty Skovlund Jr. is available now