Their Story
Remembering Kimberly N. Hampton.
Captain Kimberly Nicole Hampton of Easley, South Carolina, was an Army aviator and the commander of Delta Troop, 1st Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
She graduated from Easley High School and from Presbyterian College in 1998 with honors in English. She attended Presbyterian College on a full Army ROTC scholarship, led the cadet battalion as its commander in her senior year, and received the Wysor Saber as the battalion's top graduate.
Commissioned into Army aviation, she flew the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior. She served in Korea and in Afghanistan, and deployed to Iraq with her troop in August 2003.
On January 2, 2004, Captain Hampton was killed near Fallujah, Iraq, when the Kiowa Warrior she was piloting was brought down by enemy fire. She was 27. The 82nd Airborne Division remembers her as the first female pilot and female paratrooper from the division to fall in the line of duty in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
She was the only child of Dale and Ann Hampton. Her name endures at Fort Bragg, on the Hampton Building of the 1st Squadron, 17th Cavalry and on Kimberly Hampton Primary School, and at home in Easley in a memorial park and library, a stretch of South Carolina Highway 88, and a scholarship for Presbyterian College ROTC cadets.