Gov. Wes Moore inaccurately claimed on a White House fellowship application that he had been awarded a Bronze Star for his military service, according to a 2006 document unearthed by The New York Times.
“For my work,” Moore wrote on his application, according to the document obtained and published by the Times on Thursday, “the 82nd Airborne Division have awarded me the Bronze Star Medal and the Combat Action Badge.”
“I made an honest mistake by including something because my commanding officer thought it was a good idea,” Moore told the Times. “He thought that I earned it and he was already going through the paperwork to process it.”
In a statement issued after the Times report, Moore again characterized the inclusion of the medal as an “honest mistake” and criticized “attacks” on his military record. He also said he regretted not correcting the application.
Moore did earn awards for his military service, including from a deployment to Afghanistan in 2005 and 2006, according to military records provided by the U.S. Army. But a Bronze Star is not among the awards.
The commendation is given to members of the armed services who have distinguished themselves by “heroic or meritorious achievement or service,” according to a U.S. Air Force description.
Lt. Gen. Michael Fenzel, a mentor to Moore who was his deputy brigade commander in Afghanistan, told the New York Times that he told Moore that he and others had approved the medal and he should include it in his application for a White House fellowship, which he was selected for. Fenzel told the Times that it wasn’t until this week that he learned from Moore that the Bronze Star was never awarded.
Fenzel told the newspaper that he would resubmit the Bronze Star paperwork for Moore.
In his public statement, Moore said that a superior had instructed him to include the Bronze Star on his fellowship application “because he received confirmation with the approval authority that the Bronze Star was signed and approved by his senior leadership.”
“In the military, there is an understanding that if a senior officer tells you that an action is approved, you can trust that as fact,” Moore said in the statement. “That is why it was part of the application, plain and simple.”
Moore’s statement also acknowledged that he learned near the end of his deployment that he was not awarded the Bronze Star.
“It was an honest mistake, and I regret not making that correction,” Moore said. “But do not think for a moment that this attack on my record holds any bearing on how I feel about my service, my soldiers, or our country
Military historian Doug Sterner helped draft the Stolen Valor Act 2006, which made lying about a military award or decoration a federal crime. Sterner helps investigate claims of stolen valor.
Sterner said Moore’s situation appeared to him like a case of the military not following through on delivering a commendation, something he said isn’t unusual.
“I think you know that it’s a shame that it has led to this kind of attack on a veteran,” he said.
He was “encouraged” that Moore’s former commanding officer told The Times he planned to resubmit the paperwork.
“I think that’s admirable,” he said.
Questions about the Bronze Star have swirled since Moore launched his run for governor, in part because interviewers and others have incorrectly credited him with the honor. Moore also has faced questions about how deep his roots in Baltimore are, with some incorrectly labeling him as a Baltimore native even though he spent much of his childhood in New York City.
At least twice, television hosts introducing Moore on their programs stated that Moore had a Bronze Star and he did not correct them, including on a PBS panel discussion with the late Gwen Ifill in 2008 and on “The Colbert Report” with Stephen Colbert in 2010.
And in 2013, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel column previewing a speech Moore was set to give at a local college also included the Bronze Star as among the future governor’s accolades.
In the Colbert episode, the host read off Moore’s resume highlights.
“You’re a decorated veteran of the Afghan war,” Colbert said.
The future governor of the state of Maryland nodded and said: “Yes sir.”
“You have the Bronze Star,” Colbert continued, as Moore continued to nod his head. The studio audience cheered as the camera panned to a wide shot of Colbert and Moore. Moore was still nodding.
Moore likewise did not correct Ifill when she made a similar statement.
When Moore was running for governor in 2022, The Baltimore Banner asked him about Colbert and others who had said he had a Bronze Star.
“Well, I think if there were things that were said that were incorrect about me in my bio, I hope that wouldn’t be something where I have to be put in a position to be able to correct that person on the spot on live national television,” Moore said.
“And that’s why, in moments where I have not corrected that person immediately, I just try to always maintain that I stand by the things that I said and things that I have written.”
According to a U.S. Army spokesperson at the Pentagon, Moore’s military commendation include:
- National Defense Service Medal
- Afghanistan Campaign Medal
- Armed Forces Reserve Medal with “M” Device
- Army Service Ribbon
- Parachutist Badge
The Army played a key role in Moore’s development from a troubled boy in New York to a successful adult in the worlds of finance, nonprofit leadership and now politics.
His mother sent Moore off to a military boarding school, where he also earned an associates degree and joined the U.S. Army Reserve.
Moore served in the Army Reserve from 1996 through 2014, including a deployment to Afghanistan from August 2005 through March 2006, according to records provided by the Pentagon.
“I loved the discipline. I loved the leadership. I loved the fact that, you’re taking these X amount of people … and then you’re in charge of their health, their welfare, their development,” Moore said in a C-SPAN interview in 2006. “And I liked that, I thought I was good at it.”
Moore graduated from Valley Forge’s high school and earned a commission in the Army Reserve in 1996. He then stayed on for two years of college at Valley Forge, earning an associate’s degree before finishing his undergraduate career at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He later earned a master’s degree from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.
Moore served one active-duty deployment in Afghanistan from August 2005 until March 2006, according to the Army.
He served as a military police officer and when he left the Army Reserve in 2014, he held the rank of captain, according to the Army.
Moore has said that he was working as an investment banker in London when Fenzel — “a good friend and hero of mine” — encouraged him to do a tour on active duty.
“A sense of duty to my oath as an officer, a sense of commitment to the troops I would lead, and a sense of loyalty to my friend who asked me to join him propelled me to leave my comfortable existence and spend nine months in the border region of Afghanistan,” Moore told the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, as he testified on the war in Afghanistan, according to the hearing transcript.
He told senators that his service in Afghanistan was “some of the most trying, exhilarating, and heartbreaking days of my life.”
Moore has said that in Afghanistan, he was “director of information operations” for the 82nd Airborne Division’s 1st Brigade. That meant he “managed the flow of information either coming in or going out, you worked with the PSYOP team, the Psychological Operations Civil Affairs,” Moore said in the C-SPAN interview.
Moore said he focused on “Program Takhim-E Solh,” which he described on C-SPAN as a reconciliation program, convincing people in the country to turn over their weapons “and pledge allegiance to this new Afghan government.”
He’s worked the military principle of “Leave No One Behind” into his campaign speeches and materials, and later made it the motto of his gubernatorial administration.
At Moore’s gubernatorial inauguration in 2023, retired Lt. Col. Jaime Martinez, who said he had served with Moore, spoke on the steps of the State House during the ceremony.
Martinez praised Moore’s decision to volunteer to deploy to Afghanistan as an act of selfless service to the country. Moore, as part of the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, was part of a mission to prepare for Afghanistan’s first legislative elections while building the economy and “extending the rule of law,” Martinez said. The troops were in constant contact with “a relentless enemy.”
“He was a kind of guy with unlimited potential and he could have chosen to do anything with his life and succeeded,” Martinez said. “But Wes had also taken an oath of service and he saw it as his duty to raise his hand. ‘Send me,’ he said. ‘I will go.’ And from Day One, he was all in.”
