An all-American girl, a top scholar, student body president, ROTC battalion commander, and highly ranked college tennis player; and the first woman combat pilot killed in battle 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, when in January 2, 2004, whilst flying above Fallujah, Iraq, searching for an illusive sniper on the rooftops of the city, the helicopter crashed, killing her. A little past noon her helicopter was wracked by an explosion; a heat-seeking air-to-ground missile had gone into the exhaust and knocked off the helicopter's tail boom. Kimberly's Flight is the story of Captain Hampton's exemplary life. This story is told through nearly fifty interviews and her own e-mails to family and friends, and is entwined with Ann Hampton's narrative of loving and losing a child. AUTHOR: Award-winning journalist Anna Simon has been a reporter with The Greenville News in South Carolina since 1990. She received the South Carolina Press Association's first place award for Reporting in Depth in 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 immediately following her daughter's death, when Ms. Simon wrote a series of stories for The Greenville News about Kimberly. Ann has travelled twice to Iraq, most recently in November 2010 as a Gold Star Mom in a ?Hugs for Healing? program where American and Iraqi mothers grieving the deaths of their children worked side-by-side on humanitarian projects. ILLUSTRATIONS: 16 pages of colour photographs
