A Stroke of Fate

Where to start? That was the question that hung over West Ashley artist Bob Wilson Jr., about this time last year after being commissioned to paint the portrait of U.S. Army Capt. Kimberly Hampton, the first woman from South Carolina to die in combat, and the first American woman to be killed in air combat as a result of enemy action in 2004.
U.S. Army Brig. General (Ret.) Ed Hall had approached him, asking him to do something small for the family of the former Easley tennis star, based on the cover-art for the book her mother had written about her passing and her life.
Hall, the past commander and historian at an American Legion Post in Spartanburg, was already well known to Wilson, a former Navy man, who is also a post member. So is his father, painter Bob Wilson, Sr., whose massive battle scenes line the halls at the Statehouse in Columbia and hang in the Pentagon in the nation’s Capitol.
Should the composition stay small, or go big? Should he craft a painting of her when she was in her tennis days? Or should be of her in her uniform as a 27-year-old helicopter commander? What about a double-portrait that combined the two perspectives? What would the Hamptons want?
Wilson didn’t have much to work with, just a dark photo from the book jacket, and a senior picture in a white dress from Presbyterian College, about the size of a deck of cards. Nothing else he could find had high enough resolution to help him with detail.
A month went by of Wilson mulling in his Melrose neighborhood home. It was their only child. Cheerful seemed wrong; so did anything that heighten their sense of loss.
And then the solution began to reveal itself. Wilson decided on placing Hampton, a woman he’d never met and who’d died nearly a decade before during Operation Iraqi Freedom, next to her helicopter, bathed in the sunlight, flashing that quick smile that her mom said came on fast and could break her seriousness growing up.
While Hampton’s battle may have been over, Wilson’s work had just begun.
Final Deployment
Before she died a hero, before her helicopter was shot down in Fallujah, before she was a tennis star at Presbyterian, before she shined at Easley High as student body president, Kimberly was Dale and Ann’s “miracle” baby, born 12 years after they married young.
Her background informed her decisions. She had a family that was religion and intertwined in the military and money wasn’t exactly growing on trees. Dale and Ann made a pact to make sure their daughter would get the best they could give her.
While she’s tons better about the loss, what Kimberly has missed haunts Ann to this day.
“She wanted to marry; she was engaged when she passed,” says Ann. “She wanted children, and I wanted her to know the complete joy of being a mother. I feel sad she didn’t get to experience that.
“On the other hand, I know she’s experiencing a joy much greater than motherhood; she’s in a better place, in a peaceful world with her heavenly father. I call Kimberly’s death her ‘final deployment,’” says Ann. But I’m selfish — I still want my baby back.”
Footwork
Wilson’s first few rounds of work were far from artistic. Hitting the books and the Internet, he had to do some basic research. How did she wear the flag on her shoulder, what kind of helmet did she wear, what about the various pins and other badges on her uniform?
Painting the portrait may have “only” consumed 60 hours, but it was the tip of the iceberg. At its base were moments like the army/navy storeowner refusing to lend Wilson a matching flight suit because Hollywood had dinged up past uniforms. That meant doing studies of the helmet and suit in the store.
A Ruby Tuesday’s bartender filled in as the body double for a woman who had “spun in” leading a mission looking for weapons caches and snipers before a surface-to-air missile slammed into her rear rotor.
Wilson, a Clemson-trained engineer, figured it out eventually, and months later delivered the painting to Hall and it was unveiled last weekend in Easley. And only then did he meet the Hamptons.
Salve
“Oh, I think he did a wonderful job,” says Ann, who went on to laughingly praise Wilson’s nerve for “disobeying orders from a general,” which only wanted a small portrait.
The full-body portrait will be on display for a short time at Presbyterian College before it is hung permanently at the Captain Kimberly Hampton Memorial Library. It won’t be the fallen hero’s first, or last public honor.
On top of the Bronze Star and the Air Medal and the Purple Heart, Hampton was awarded posthumously, there are now scholarships in her name to her alma mater, the state tennis association named the most improved award in her honor, Easley dedicated its city hall flagpole in her honor, a blood drive bears her name.
And soon a headquarters building and school on Ft. Bragg will be named in her honor, once they’re completed, the first on base named for a woman.
For a while, the honors were cold comfort for Ann.
“Initially, it just hurt so bad for something to happen that honored Kimberly; it just hurt to have the wound reopened, because she wasn’t there any longer,” said Ann. Beginning in 2009, five years after he daughter’s death, Ann began to find a salve to her heart’s wounds.
And it was in the unlikeliest of places – Iraq.
“I finally got to the point of being able to celebrate her life and part of the healing began when I’d been to Iraq,” she said of her excursions to the northern part of Iraq, where the Kurds expressed deep gratitude for freeing them from Saddam’s regime.
“I have friends over there now that continue to remember and honor Kimberly. Some of those friends call me ‘Momma.’”
Nothing takes away the grief or the pain, but she says she’s getting better. And as she improves, so does Dale.
But now, whenever they want, Ann and Dale can go into town and visit the library and see an image of their miracle child, and what she’s meant to a community and to a nation.