U.S. Army Captain Kimberly N. Hampton was living her dream: flying armed
helicopters in combat and commanding D Troop, 1st Squadron, 17th
Cavalry, the armed reconnaissance aviation squadron of the 82nd Airborne
Division. An all-American girl from a small southern mill town, Kimberly
was a top scholar, student body president, ROTC battalion commander, and
highly ranked college tennis player. In 1998 she was commissioned as a
second lieutenant in the Army. Then, driven by determination and
ambition, Kimberly rapidly rose through the ranks in the almost all-male
bastion of military aviation to command a combat aviation troop.
On January 2, 2004, Captain Hampton was flying an OH-58D Kiowa Warrior
helicopter above Fallujah, Iraq, in support of a raid on an illicit
weapons marketplace, searching for an illusive sniper on the rooftops of
the city. A little past noon her helicopter was wracked by an explosion.
A heat-seeking surface-to-air missile had gone into the exhaust and
knocked off the helicopter's tail boom. The helicopter crashed, killing
Kimberly.
Kimberly's Flight is the story of Captain Hampton's exemplary life. This
story is told through nearly 50 interviews and her own emails to family
and friends, and is entwined with Ann Hampton's narrative of loving and
losing a child.
Retired award-winning journalist Anna Simon was been a reporter with
The Greenville News in South Carolina for 21 years. She received the
South Carolina Press Association's first place award for Reporting in
Depth for 2009, and is a past recipient of multiple awards in education
reporting, the press association's Judson Chapman Award for Community
Service, and other news and feature writing awards.
Kimberly's mother, Ann Hampton, first met Anna Simon at the bleakest
point in her life, immediately following her daughter's death, when Ms.
Simon wrote a series of stories for The Greenville News about
Kimberly's life and the reaction in the small Southern town of Easley,
SC to her death. Ann has traveled twice to Iraq, in 2010, as a Gold Star
Mom in a "Hugs for Healing" program sanctioned by the U.S. State
Department, where American and Iraqi mothers grieving the deaths of
their children worked side-by-side on humanitarian projects, and in 2011
on a humanitarian mission with "Friends of Kurdistan."
