On Dec. 8, 2005, Lt. Wes Moore, stationed on the eastern edge of Afghanistan at Forward Operating Base Salerno, went to sleep in his tent unaware the next day would bring rocket fire and news of his grandfather’s death.
It was the start of a chaotic, defining month for Moore. He would journey home to America to bury the man who’d essentially been his father and elope with his fiancée, then learn a friend and fellow soldier had been killed in action. All the while, he was trying to finish an application for a prestigious White House fellowship, setting himself up for life after Afghanistan.
Moore, now the governor of Maryland, rarely speaks about this part of his life in interviews or political speeches, save for passing references and the story of the once-secret elopement. In his 2015 book “The Work: Searching for a Life That Matters,” Moore writes sparingly about the grief he felt over the two deaths. His doctors, he would later say, told him that writing about what he experienced could help him process his emotions.
He chronicled pent-up grief and the need to keep his composure while deployed. In that version of events, Moore mourned the death of 1st Sgt. Tobias “Toby” Meister at his grandfather’s funeral. When he saw the Rev. Dr. James Thomas’ casket, all of that emotion came rushing forth.
“Inside that casket, I also saw Toby,” Moore writes. He cried tears “for all of them.” When he left, he felt “freer.”
The passage is a neatly constructed, cathartic examination of loss contrasted with the strength required to lead. But Meister died on Dec. 28, 11 days after Thomas’ funeral. A roadside bomb hit his Humvee outside the town of Asadabad. Moore did not learn of Meister’s death until he returned to Afghanistan in early January.
Eleven years after the book was published, Moore explained the inaccuracy as a result of poor editing and the effects stress, grief and time can have on memory. Had he anticipated that his service record would be parsed in the way it is, he would have written certain sections of “The Work” with more care, he said.
For months, Moore, widely considered a 2028 presidential hopeful, has been the subject of what he has described as an effort to undermine his integrity by conservative media outlets, particularly those owned by David Smith, the executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group and owner of The Baltimore Sun.
The governor and his staff have dismissed those stories as hackery. However, Moore and his wife, Dawn, say they have grown increasingly concerned about the possibility of misinformation taking root. His military service has been a defining aspect of his image as he’s pursued public office and built a national media profile, and it’s been a point of personal pride.
“It’s been my foundation,” Moore said. “It’s all I’ve ever prepared to do. In some way, shape or form it’s the only thing that’s ever felt right to me.”
To address questions about his service, the Moores sat for interviews with The Banner.
Moore’s staff also provided access to requested military records, some of which are not publicly available, and helped coordinate interviews with people who served with him or knew details of his deployment. Taken together, they form a composite of a competent, well-respected soldier.
The Banner also reviewed many of Moore’s public statements and writings about his Army tenure. As with the Meister passage, Moore has on multiple occasions either mischaracterized or inaccurately recounted details relating to his time in uniform. While he acknowledges the errors, Moore said they should not be construed in a way that would undermine his service.
“There’s maybe ways I could have articulated things differently, but it still doesn’t take away from what we experienced and what we did, and what, frankly, I’m still dealing with,” Moore said.
Moore’s defining chapter, under fire
Politicians and other public figures at times misremember or misrepresent their military service. Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut said he’d served in Vietnam when he had not; former Republican Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois wrongly claimed he’d been the Navy’s intelligence officer of the year.
In 2024, The New York Times reported that Moore had wrongly claimed a Bronze Star on a 2006 application for the White House fellowship program. Moore apologized for what he and his former commanding officer described as a mistake and a paperwork error. That saga ended with Moore being awarded a Bronze Star months later.
Moore has also been accused of overburnishing his biography.
Presented as news analysis, reporting from Sinclair and The Sun has seized on claims Moore made about his military career on social media, in interviews and in “The Work.” Those stories, whose premise was challenged by a Baltimore Sun columnist, have questioned the circumstances around how Moore came to be in Afghanistan, whether he was the beneficiary of special treatment and whether he’d ever faced danger, often relying on the opinions of anonymous sources and a limited selection of his military records. (The outlets have asked Moore to release the entirety of those records, which he has declined to do.)
A May 17 front-page story in The Sun asked whether Moore’s service had been “a ticket punch for polishing a political résumé, selling books and building Moore into a national political brand.”
This idea is deeply offensive to Moore. A graduate of military school and a longtime Army reservist, Moore’s time on active duty was relatively brief — seven months in Afghanistan following a monthslong training — but it has strongly influenced his public persona. His campaign slogan and governing mantra, “leave no one behind,” recasts a line from the Army Soldier’s Creed.
His frustration with the coverage is fueled by a belief that he can provide answers to many of the perceived gaps and shortcomings raised in it.
Initially reluctant to respond, Moore said he felt compelled to defend himself partly because an attack on him was effectively an attack on those he had served with.
“Sometimes in their attacks on me there almost is not this — either recognition or concern — that … you’re going to create collateral damage,” he said. “And that’s not OK, and that’s not fair, and it’s not right.”
Filling in the gaps
Moore has often told a very streamlined version of how he got to Afghanistan, recounting getting a call, heading to a base to train up and then flying out. The reality was more nuanced.
An Army reservist, Moore was working at an investment bank in London in 2004 when his mentor, now-retired Lt. Gen. Michael Fenzel, called and asked if he planned to get in the fight.
The two met while Moore was playing for the Johns Hopkins University football team; a coach introduced them. Fenzel, a former Blue Jays linebacker, helped Moore secure a summer 2002 internship at what was then the Office of Homeland Security and, later, a White House fellowship. He also served as one of Moore’s groomsmen.
Moore and Fenzel, in numerous interviews and writings, have said the young banker was considering running for office when Fenzel, then a lieutenant colonel, suggested Moore had more to prove before he could ask for votes.
“What have you done to serve the people that would make you a compelling candidate?” Fenzel recounted asking Moore, according to a 2006 Baltimore Sun article. Fenzel declined to be interviewed on the record for this story, citing his post-Army employment.
To deploy, Moore would have to complete officer training required for active duty, a standard step for reservists upon completing their undergraduate degrees. However, the Army can delay that requirement for officers who receive prestigious scholarships such as the Rhodes, which Moore received. Correspondence from the early 2000s shows the Army knew Moore was pursuing a graduate degree at Oxford.
The Army ordered Moore in January 2003 to report to Georgia’s Fort Benning that March for infantry-officer basic training, which would have satisfied the requirement.
Moore reported, but he aggravated a knee injury suffered in college and could not finish the training. Email correspondence between Moore and an Army physician shows they discussed the injury in the second half of 2004, after he had spoken with Fenzel about deploying to Afghanistan. Moore wrote that he was “anxious to get to an OBC asap.” OBC is an acronym for Officer Basic Course, the required training he had missed.
Moore arrived in February 2005 at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri, where he completed the training despite his injured knee. In one instance, Moore and his “battle buddy,” Joseph Horvath, set out on a required miles-long ruck march, each carrying more than 35 pounds of gear. In an interview, Horvath said Moore finished in pain.
“I can still see him sweating through the end,” Horvath said. “I didn’t even know how bad his knee was until he was laid up that weekend icing it.”
Once in Afghanistan, Moore was given a job usually reserved for a more senior officer, which he acknowledges. At Fenzel’s direction, he was to serve as the information operations officer for the 82nd Airborne’s 1st Brigade. His responsibilities were to manage public affairs, military deception and information capabilities to influence enemy behavior. Put plainly, his job was to find ways to convince the Taliban to switch sides.
Retired Lt. Gen. Douglas Stitt, who served in Afghanistan and ran human resources for that brigade, said Moore’s route to deployment was “nontraditional” but stressed there was “nothing illegal, immoral or unethical” about it. Stitt processed the paperwork that brought Moore into the unit and later oversaw human resources for the entire Army before his retirement in 2024.
He said the Army was in a fierce competition for talent at that time, and the opportunity to add a Rhodes scholar who came recommended by a senior officer was an easy choice.
“I don’t want to overdramatize, but here’s an extra set of hands that are almost, it’s a manna from heaven, and he wants to come over here,” Stitt said.
Moore’s officer evaluation report shows he excelled in the role. Fenzel and another officer, then-Maj. Jamie Gottschling, lauded his “extraordinary intellect” and “tremendous talent.”
“1LT Moore has unlimited potential and could be a major today. He will command a company with distinction and should only be considered for the most demanding jobs,” Gottschling wrote.
He was promoted to captain during his deployment.
Given all of this, Dawn Moore said her husband’s service should be unassailable. She believes detractors are trying to discredit him through bad-faith journalism because they perceive a political threat.
“There are real nefarious forces and people who are willing to try to destroy, because they are concerned about whatever they’re concerned about,” she said.
Moore’s words cause problems
This is not the first time things Moore wrote in a book have caused him problems. During his 2022 campaign for governor, he faced questions about claims he’d made in “The Other Wes Moore,” which describes “the story of two boys living in Baltimore” who’d “grown up at the same time, on the same streets.”
Moore was born in Montgomery County but spent most of his childhood in the Bronx. While he attended boarding school at Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania, his mother moved to Anne Arundel County. A news story announcing he’d been selected as a Rhodes scholar in 2000 describes him as a “Pasadena resident.”
As with the current scrutiny of his military service, Moore sought to get out in front of any controversy. A website touting his Baltimore bona fides, which is now offline, offered one correction: Some copies of “The Other Wes Moore” have a factually incorrect back cover that reads, “Two kids named Wes Moore were born blocks apart within a year of each other.”
In “The Work,” Moore makes similar claims about his military service that either lack context or are verifiably false.
He writes of his division spending the “blisteringly hot Georgia summer of 2005″ at Fort Benning training for deployment. While Moore did spend a week at Fort Benning before deploying to Afghanistan, the 82nd Airborne trained separately and deployed before him. The governor’s records show he trained that spring and summer at Fort Leonard Wood. Horvath, Moore’s colleague, said the Missouri summer was “hot and uncomfortable.”
The book also contains an evocative description of the first time Moore was shot at in Afghanistan, describing “the sound of shells buzzing past your ears, a flurry of divots leaping out of the earth around your feet.” His office could not provide documentation of that firefight. Moore has also referenced the experience of leading soldiers into combat.
In an interview, Moore said he had never been ordered to lead offensive missions in Afghanistan, but maintained he had faced danger.
“I was scared over there,” Moore said.
Records provided by his office show he was awarded a Combat Action Badge for coming under indirect fire on Dec. 9, 2005, when his base was rocketed — one of many occasions. Other records and interviews show Moore made numerous trips outside “the wire,” military slang for a base’s perimeter. Traveling from one base to another or to an Afghan village risked encountering improvised explosive devices on roads or being attacked by rocket-propelled grenades when traveling by helicopter.
A Marine named Anthony Del Signore, who was attached to Moore’s unit and regularly traveled with him, said that at least once their convoy “took some shots.”
Some of the errors in “The Work” just seem sloppy. For example, Moore writes that he was a “captain in the Army” when he deployed in 2005.
The copyright page notes that, although the book is nonfiction and based on Moore’s recollections, there are “limited cases” in which “names of people or places, dates, sequences, or the detail of events have been changed.”
Moore acknowledged he was aiming to tell more of a story in “The Work” than to publish a purely factual recounting.
Yet none of this fully explains how Moore wrote about Toby Meister, whose death he intertwined with his grandfather’s.
What Moore carries
The storyline of Moore’s life since returning from Afghanistan in March 2006 has largely been presented as an unbroken ascent. Get a White House fellowship, return to Wall Street, publish a best-seller, become famous, fight child poverty, run for governor and win. All of it stems from his time in uniform.
Left unexamined has been the cost of it all, which Moore has rarely discussed. Over Memorial Day weekend, he sat in his office and tried to explain. When he got back to the U.S., white lights were tough. At night, he’d go through his mother’s house and turn everything off, making sure they had “100% light discipline” like on base. Driving on the highway was hard, too. Most of all, he felt like he couldn’t talk to the people around him about the things that happened over there. He’s since seen doctors and sought counseling.
And he carries a sense of guilt over Meister’s death.
“I think I put a lot of weight on myself,” Moore said.
One mistake sticks out in Moore’s mind. He recalled discussing with Meister over satellite phone the route a convoy should take, which is against protocol because communications could be intercepted and the Taliban could plan an ambush. Meister told him they should take this discussion “offline,” and Moore apologized. Meister was killed several weeks later. People familiar with the details told The Banner the incident could not have factored into his death.
Moore was conscious that he was different from his fellow soldiers. He was a Rhodes scholar and investment banker who arrived in Afghanistan later and under different circumstances than the others. Determined to prove himself, Moore said he committed to outworking everyone else.
“I didn’t want to let them down,” he said of his comrades.
Even though he was senior in rank, Moore admired Meister, who was three years older. Meister was a model soldier, a real “dipped-and-dyed patriot,” according to his mother, Judy. Like Moore, Meister was a reservist who volunteered to deploy out of a sense of duty. They became friends, Moore said, and their duties sometimes overlapped.
Moore later acknowledged in a different interview that he couldn’t have seen his friend in his grandfather’s casket, even if that’s how it felt in his head a decade later.
But he was reeling when he went home in December 2005.
Dawn Moore said she remembers him being detached when he arrived stateside, as if the reality of his grandfather’s death had not sunk in. Then, when they were alone, he began to cry uncontrollably. She said she had never seen a display of emotion like that from him before or since. A few days after the funeral, they eloped in Las Vegas because spouses of dead soldiers receive more benefits.
Learning of Meister’s death after his return to Afghanistan offered a fresh round of devastation.
When Wes Moore told this story in full, he did so in fits and starts, pausing to steady himself. At the end, he grew quiet.
“I just, I never want to disappoint,” he finally said in his office.
Nothing, he said, was more important than his integrity.
