Malcolm Nance believes that the best soldiers are the ones that stay alive and the ones that die are simply living out God's will. Nance made these remarks during a podcast appearance with Maj Toure back in 2020 and since then he's served as a Foreign Legionnaire in Ukraine with that nation's defense forces. Nance went from the US Navy, to being a pundit on MSNBC, to heading into Ukraine in fatigues.
Toure asked him about his experience in combat. "What's the difference between being a good soldier and being a great soldier?" Toure asked.
"Well, you know, let me talk more about the people that I know, because I knew people in the intelligence community." Nance served for 20 years in the US Navy in intelligence. "And we're talking again, this world we're in is sort of like, you know, this isn't cryptologic collection. I did, you know, Special Operations cryptology. And you might recall, we lost one this year, who was a legacy person from my world, Chief Shannon Kent, Senior Chief, I guess she was promoted to," he said.
"But the really great ones don't get killed, or if they do, it's God's will," Nance said. Nance then broke down the job of intelligence officers versus what he called "door kickers," saying that the intelligence officers' mission is to gather data to send to the "door kickers."
Kent was posthumously promoted to Senior Chief Petty Officer and she was buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Her husband Joe Kent ran for congress. Nearly a year after his wife's death, he spoke about Donald Trump attending the return of her remains at Dover Air Force Base. He recalled Trump saying to him "Shannon was the real deal, we are lucky to have people like her willing to go out there and face evil for us."
"And she was doing human intelligence as a Navy cryptologist, Arabic interpreter in Syria, alongside of special operations, a Special Operations Officer, an interpreter and a Defense Intelligence Agency human intelligence officer," Nance said. Kent, a linguist, was killed in January 2019 during a suicide bombing in Manbij, Syria, one of four Americans killed in the attack. The four were being watched by the Islamic State when they entered a kebab restaurant on a busy street.
She was a 35-year-old mother of two and her youngest was just 3-years-old. "Momma no fight bad guys," he told her in the days leading up to her deployment. Her widowed husband is also a veteran who served on 11 combat deployments with the Green Berets. Kent had not expected to be deployed, and in fact, was not meant to be deployed, per her understanding. Stars and Stripes reported that "Kent was slated to attend a clinical psychology doctoral program in lieu of the deployment. But the Navy reversed the move because she previously had cancer, rejected her waiver applications and she received orders to deploy to Syria instead."
The attack that took Kent's life was "the deadliest attack on US forces in the campaign against the Islamic State," the Washington Post said at the time. Kent's death was highlighted as she was "the first female service member to die in combat in that conflict."
