By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
After nearly a year of investigation into Gov. Wes Moore’s military biography, the question most conspicuously unanswered isn’t about documents. It’s about people.
Where is everyone else?
Moore served in Afghanistan from August 2005 to March 2006 with the 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division at FOB Salerno in Regional Command-East. That unit had real soldiers — officers, NCOs, enlisted men — who were present for Moore’s deployment. Some of them would know, firsthand, whether a headquarters staff lieutenant ever led soldiers into direct-fire combat. None of them have spoken publicly to corroborate what Moore has spent years telling audiences he did.
Spotlight on Maryland asked Moore directly: provide the names of the soldiers he led in the combat engagements he describes. He refused.
The only person who has put his name behind Moore’s account is Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel. And Fenzel is not a neutral witness.
What Spotlight Found
Spotlight on Maryland — a joint investigative venture by FOX45 News, The Baltimore Sun, and WJLA — spent nearly a year reviewing military records and asking questions about the combat narrative Moore has built his public identity around.
Their findings are stark. Military records show no evidence that Moore, assigned as a brigade headquarters staff officer, experienced the direct-fire firefights his public narrative conveys. He was not awarded a Combat Action Badge for the specific firefight he describes. He would later earn that badge for a separate attack on his base — a different incident from the combat he has described leading soldiers through.
Two separate official documents — Moore’s 2006 officer evaluation report, written during his deployment, and his retroactive Bronze Star citation issued in 2024 — neither mentions his participation in direct combat engagements. Those documents were prepared eighteen years apart, by different people, under different circumstances. Neither corroborates the story.
Spotlight asked Moore, his former superior officers, and the Army to provide evidence of direct-fire combat participation. Their requests sought basic forms of corroboration: spot reports from daily journals, witness accounts, awards or badges for combat, or after-action reports. They also asked Moore to provide the names of the soldiers he claims to have led in those engagements. He denied every request.
Those “former superior officers” include two specific men: Lt. Col. Michael Fenzel, the brigade’s deputy commander, and Col. Patrick Donahue, the brigade’s commanding officer. Donahue commanded CTF Devil — the operational name for the 1st Brigade, 82nd Airborne during the 2005–06 deployment — and was Fenzel’s direct superior.
In 2008, Donahue and Fenzel co-authored a detailed after-action account of the deployment for Military Review, the Army’s professional journal, under the title “Combating a Modern Insurgency: Combined Task Force Devil in Afghanistan.” The paper describes the brigade’s combat operations across ten provinces in granular detail — the Korengal Valley fighting, air assault raids along the Pakistan border, artillery employment, reconstruction operations, and the 2005 parliamentary elections. It describes Information Operations as a staff-level supporting function, massed alongside electronic warfare, surveillance assets, and aviation to support maneuver battalions in the field. The heaviest fighting described in the paper — in Kunar Province’s Korengal Valley and the border districts of Paktika Province — is attributed entirely to Marine and infantry battalion units. No brigade headquarters staff officer is mentioned in a direct combat context anywhere in the paper.
Moore’s name does not appear in the body of the article. It appears once — in the acknowledgments. Donahue and Fenzel thank “CPT Westley Moore (former CTF Devil IO Chief)” for his “cogent contributions to this article.”
Moore contributed to the paper. He helped write the after-action account of his own deployment. That account describes IO as a staff function supporting maneuver units. It contains no reference to a headquarters officer leading soldiers into direct combat. Moore reviewed and contributed to a document that, in its silence, contradicts the narrative he has been telling publicly for twenty years.
Neither Donahue nor Fenzel has provided any public corroboration of Moore’s specific combat account. Donahue — the man who commanded the entire brigade — has not spoken publicly about Moore’s story at all.
The Baltimore Sun summarized the evidentiary gap plainly: the absence of documentary detail “does not disprove it happened. But paired with the lack of corroboration from the Army, from Moore’s former brigade leadership, or Moore himself, it leaves a substantial hole in an important part of his public narrative.”
Moore’s public response, offered to Politico, leaned on institutional deflection: “You know who doesn’t question my story? The United States Army. You know who doesn’t question my story? The 82nd Airborne Division, who I served with in Afghanistan.”
He named an institution. He did not name a person.
The Fenzel Problem
Fenzel’s loyalty to Moore is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether that loyalty makes him a credible corroborating witness.
The two men were introduced years before Afghanistan by a mutual acquaintance and developed a relationship that went well beyond professional. Fenzel later stood as a groomsman at Moore’s 2007 wedding. By Moore’s own public accounts, Fenzel had pressed him to consider how military service might shape his viability for future political office. When Moore deployed to Afghanistan, it was Fenzel — then a lieutenant colonel serving as the brigade’s deputy commander — who arranged the assignment.
That assignment itself has drawn scrutiny. Moore held a Military Police qualification. Fenzel placed him in an Information Operations role — identified in Donahue and Fenzel’s own 2008 Military Review paper as “CTF Devil IO Chief” — a job that, according to retired Army officers ranging in rank from major to brigadier general consulted by Spotlight, Moore had no training or qualification to perform. Those officers described the arrangement as highly unusual, said it appeared to benefit Moore personally, and asked to remain anonymous out of concern they might be targeted on social media for offering professional opinions about an elected official’s military record. Spotlight reported that the placement may have violated Army Regulation 614-100, the officer assignment policy.
Fenzel wrote Moore’s performance evaluations during that deployment. He nominated Moore for the Bronze Star. He encouraged Moore to list that award on his 2006 White House Fellowship application before the medal had actually been conferred — a discrepancy Moore did not correct for years, even as journalists repeated the claim. The Bronze Star was finally pinned on Moore’s chest in December 2024, at a private ceremony at the governor’s mansion. Fenzel did the pinning, saying he was glad “to right a wrong.”
When Fenzel speaks on Moore’s behalf, he is not an outside observer vouching for what he witnessed. He is a central actor in the very set of circumstances under examination. His corroboration and the questions Spotlight is asking are not separate matters. They are the same matter.
The Silence of Everyone Else
Moore has said, repeatedly, that his combat service speaks for itself and that those who question it are motivated by politics. But the test of that claim isn’t whether Moore believes it. The test is whether anyone who was actually present has said so.
They haven’t.
The named voices who have spoken on the record are critics, not defenders. John Merson, a former Army captain who served in Afghanistan, told Spotlight that Moore’s characterization of himself as simultaneously an infantry officer, a military police officer, and a special operations soldier is false — and that most veterans hearing such claims are skeptical. “That statement is one of many false claims from Governor Moore about his time in the Army,” Merson said.
The 1st Brigade deployed to a combat zone. It suffered casualties. It had soldiers who would have known what a brigade headquarters staff lieutenant was doing during his eight months at FOB Salerno — whether he was forward with troops or behind a desk at the headquarters element. Some of those soldiers are almost certainly alive and reachable. None have come forward.
Moore’s invocation of the 82nd Airborne as an institution that “doesn’t question” him is a rhetorical move, not an evidentiary one. Institutions don’t corroborate combat stories. Soldiers do. And Moore refused to provide Spotlight with the names of a single soldier who could be asked.
That refusal, after a year of public scrutiny and with every political incentive to produce witnesses, is itself a data point.
Still Trading on It
The investigation has not slowed Moore’s use of the narrative. As recently as April 5, 2026, appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation to comment on the U.S. military posture toward Iran, Moore described himself as a combat veteran and invoked his Afghanistan service directly: “This is a forever war that is very similar to the one that I fought in. I led soldiers with the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan.”
The same claims. The same framing. No new corroboration.
Fifteen Days
Maryland’s primary election is June 23. Early voting is already underway.
Moore is running for a second term in a state where his reelection was, until recently, assumed. His approval ratings have softened. The military biography questions are no longer confined to right-leaning outlets — the Baltimore Sun and Spotlight on Maryland represent the state’s mainstream investigative infrastructure. Republican gubernatorial candidates Ed Hale and John Myrick have both released authorizations allowing media organizations to obtain their military files, publicly challenging Moore to do the same. He has not.
Voters will go to the polls without Moore having answered the central question Spotlight has been asking for a year. They will also go to the polls having heard only one person — the same person who arranged Moore’s deployment, wrote his evaluations, and stood at his wedding — offer any account of what happened in Afghanistan.
A Closed Loop
There is a structural problem with Fenzel as the sole corroborating witness, and it goes beyond the personal relationship.
In any accountability inquiry, a corroborating witness has value in proportion to their independence from the subject. A witness who is also a participant in the events being examined, who has their own professional and personal stake in the subject’s reputation, and who has refused to answer investigative questions while simultaneously vouching for the subject’s character — that witness does not close the evidentiary gap. They are the evidentiary gap.
Moore deployed to Afghanistan. He served. Those facts are not in dispute, and his service deserves the acknowledgment any volunteer’s service deserves. What is in dispute is the specific combat narrative Moore has spent twenty years using to establish his identity as a leader tested under fire — a narrative he has continued invoking through this spring’s primary campaign, and most recently to lend authority to his foreign policy commentary while a yearlong investigation into that very narrative remains unresolved.
That narrative has one public defender. He is not a neutral party. He is the man who wrote the evaluation — later quoted by Moore himself — calling him “the best lieutenant I senior rate” in all of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Moore declined to tell Spotlight who else was there. He declined to name a single soldier.
When the only person willing to put their name on your combat story is the man who arranged your deployment, wrote your evaluations, and stood at your altar — that is not corroboration.
That is a closed loop.
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