Photo By Lori Stewart | SGT Kenneth R. Hobson II read more read more
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by Lori S. Stewart, USAICoE Command Historian
7 AUGUST 1998
On 7 August 1998, when al-Qaeda terrorists detonated a truck bomb outside the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, one of the twelve Americans killed was Sgt. Kenneth R. Hobson II, an operations NCO assigned to the Defense Attaché Office.
Born in Placerville, California, on 1 May 1971, Kenny Ray, as he was known to his friends, spent much of his childhood in the town of Nevada, Missouri. After graduating high school, he enlisted in the U.S. Army. His first assignment after basic and advanced training was as a combat engineer in the 54th Engineer Battalion in Wildflecken, Germany. In January 1991, he deployed with his unit for five months to Saudia Arabia in support of Operation DESERT STORM. The following year, he transferred to the 326th Engineer Battalion, 101st Airborne Division, at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
Hobson’s dream, however, was to become an ambassador. In 1993, he started an intensive sixty-three-week Arabic language program at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC). While in Monterey, California, for the course, he met and married fellow student Spec. Deborah Murchison. After graduation, Kenneth attended the interrogation and strategic debriefing courses at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. His first assignment in Army intelligence was in the 202d MI Battalion at Fort Gordon, Georgia, where he served as NCOIC at the Joint Document Exploitation Center and at the Joint Interrogation Facility, a member of a mobile interrogation team, a strategic debriefer, and an interrogation section sergeant.
Still chasing his dream, however, Hobson volunteered for service in the Defense Attaché System. By January 1989, he had reported to the Defense Intelligence Agency for the Staff Operations Course at the Joint Military Attaché School, from which he received the “Silver Pen Award” for authoring the best country research paper of the course. Four months later, the 27-year-old arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, as the operations NCO for the U.S. Army Element in the U.S. Defense Attaché Office.
At 10:37 a.m. on Friday, 7 August 1998, al-Qaeda terrorists drove a truck carrying a 2,000-pound bomb to the Embassy in downtown Nairobi. Guards initially turned the vehicle away but the driver accessed an adjacent parking area in the rear of the building. While the explosion caused little structural damage to the five-story reinforced concrete building, it destroyed much of the interior on the rear side and resulted in lethal flying debris. In total, 224 persons were killed and nearly 4,600 wounded in the Nairobi attack and a nearly simultaneous explosion at the U.S. Embassy in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, about 500 miles away. While most casualties were local citizens, the death toll included twelve Americans. Hobson, whose office was located on the third floor in the rear of the building, was one of the three U.S. military personnel killed in the attack.
In response to the attack, the United States launched Operation INFINITE REACH, a series of cruise-missile strikes on terrorist targets in Sudan and Afghanistan. Ultimately, twenty-one terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, were charged in connection with the attack. Eight were captured, tried, and sentenced, while twelve have died or been killed in the years since the attack. One suspect, Saif al-Adel, remains at large and, as late as February 2023, was rumored to be the new leader of al-Qaeda. The State Department is offering a $10 million reward for information leading to his apprehension.
Kenneth Hobson received a posthumous promotion to staff sergeant along with a Legion of Merit, Purple Heart, and Distinguished Service Medal. DLIFLC memorialized its recreation center as the Hobson Student Activities Center on 5 August 1999, and the Joint Military Attaché School also renamed its “Silver Pen Award” in his honor.
For the companion piece to this article, see Erin Thompson's "Failure to Prevent Embassy Bombing in East Africa." (link: https://dvidshub.net/r/lpa9jl)
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| Date Taken: | 08.04.2023 |
| Date Posted: | 08.04.2023 17:00 |
| Story ID: | 450749 |
| Location: | US |
| Web Views: | 396 |
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