Send Me: The True Story of a Mother at War

The extraordinary story of American special operator and trailblazer Shannon Kent, who hunted high value targets on classified missions in the most dangerous locales on earth while trying to balance her life as a wife and mother—cowritten by her husband Joe Kent, a retired special operative and the former Director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center

Of the 1.3 million active-duty service members in the US military, only a tiny fraction are selected as “operators.” Shannon Kent was one of the first women to serve at this level and was widely recognized as one of the best.

Shannon served as a Navy cryptologic technician, responsible for signals intelligence and electronic warfare, but her proficiency with language set her apart. She was assigned to a unit so secretive that its name can’t even be printed here, where she worked clandestinely to hunt the most wanted terrorists in the world.

Send Me is Shannon’s heroic life story, revealing the truth of both her work and the challenges she faced while trying to raise a family with her husband Joe, himself a Special Forces soldier. He and Shannon met in a war zone, their love forged during a special operations training course, their dedication spanning multiple combat deployments and the birth of their two boys.

It is the legacy of an extraordinary woman who rose to the apex of the military, working with the most elite forces in the world, lifting the veil from the life of a Special Forces family to share their duty, sacrifice, and humanity.

Marty Skovlund, Jr., is the editor-in-chief of Task & Purpose, a military news and culture publication. He is a former Army Ranger and an experienced conflict reporter who has reported on assignment from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine in addition to embedding with the US military around the world.

Joe Kent is Shannon Kent’s husband and father of their two children. Over the course of his twenty-year military career, he served as an Army Ranger, Green Beret, and other classified special operations units.