dpFor years, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has described his Afghanistan deployment as the experience of an 82nd Airborne Division paratrooper who led soldiers in combat. Now, the Army officer who supervised Moore daily says his accounts of what happened there in 2005 and 2006 are unequivocally false.
“Be honest,” retired Lt. Col. James A. “Jamie” Gottschling said when asked what he would tell Moore. “His service in Afghanistan was good. He was a valued member of the brigade staff.” But he added, “It’s disingenuous to say that you led paratroopers in combat or that you did what would be direct action activities in a combat zone.”
When Spotlight first cast doubt on Moore’s claims of leading soldiers in combat, it had not yet learned about Moore’s direct supervisor, Gottschling, who has participated in two interviews with Spotlight. Gottschling’s knowledge of Moore’s daily activities in the combat zone adds a firsthand perspective to three Spotlight articles published in May that examined Moore’s path to Afghanistan, his duties and his false combat claims.
Moore’s office did not respond to Spotlight on Maryland’s offer to sit down with the governor and give him an opportunity to dispute his former supervisor’s statements or any of Spotlight’s reporting to date.
James “Jamie” Gottschling, the retired lieutenant colonel who was Wes Moore’s immediate supervisor in Afghanistan, said he was not consulted in the 2024 retroactive Bronze Star process. He said he would not have concurred with the decision to present that award to Moore. (courtesy of James Gottschling)
An unusual route to Afghanistan
Moore received an Army reserve commission in May 1998 but did not complete his initial officer qualification for more than seven years until graduating from the Military Police Officer Basic Course at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, in June 2005. By then, the 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division had already deployed to Afghanistan. Moore arrived Aug. 15, nearly five months after the brigade arrived in country.
Spotlight reported on May 10 that Moore’s records showed no prior troop-leading experience or information-operations training. His placement came through then-Lt. Col. Michael Fenzel, the brigade’s deputy commander and Moore’s longtime friend and mentor, who arranged a by-name deployment request for the newly qualified Army Reserve officer. For years, before attending his officer basic course, Moore largely disregarded the reserve military obligations he had undertaken as a commissioned officer, failing to fulfill the fundamental duties and training requirements that accompanied his commission.
Moore has described in various accounts, including his 2015 book, “The Work,” months of pre-deployment training with the 82nd at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Spotlight found no Army records substantiating that account; the records placed him in Military Police training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, during much of the brigade’s train-up period. Prior to that, Moore was not qualified in any Army branch and, by Army regulation, would have been ineligible to participate in such training.
Gottschling confirmed Moore, who is airborne qualified, neither trained with the brigade before deployment nor conducted training jumps. He acknowledged that Moore served with the 82nd in Afghanistan as an attached Army reservist, but said he was not in a jump status, didn’t receive jump pay and was not in a parachutist’s position.
“He’s not a paratrooper,” Gottschling said.
The job Moore actually performed
Gottschling, a field artilleryman with the rank of major during the deployment, was the brigade’s fire support coordinator and Moore’s direct supervisor. A career officer, the Ranger-qualified Gottschling spent 12 of his 20 years in prestigious Army units like the 82nd Airborne Division, the 173rd Airborne Brigade and U.S. Army Special Operations Command. Gottschling retired from the Army as a lieutenant colonel.
His responsibilities spanned kinetic and nonkinetic effects: artillery, mortars, close air support and armed drones, as well as noncombat activities such as information operations, public affairs, civil affairs and psychological operations. Moore worked directly for Gottschling exclusively on information operations coordination. Gottschling confirmed that Moore was never involved in the employment of any weapons system.
At Forward Operating Base Salerno, Gottschling said, their daily work involved analyzing reports from infantry battalions and provincial reconstruction teams, coordinating for civilian assistance and helping Afghan officials communicate with the public. He credited Moore with helping local leaders understand how to respond publicly to the needs of their communities.
“He did a really good job trying to train the Afghans how to kind of sell their own story,” Gottschling said.
Wes Moore works the phones during his staff job inside the brigade headquarters at Forward Operating Base Salerno in Afghanistan. (James Gottschling/Submitted)
When asked whether Moore was responsible for the brigade’s kinetic combat activities, Gottschling said, “No, no, his was the information operations.”
That distinction challenges Moore’s portrayal of his relationship with the soldiers he claims to have led. In his 2015 book, “The Work,” Moore spoke affectionately about the soldiers he said were assigned to him, saying that he, “adored their passion and their hearts.” He said he knew, “which ones were having financial or marital issues. Which ones were motivated by carrots, which were motivated by sticks. Which ones were making the military a career, etc.” He said he worked hard to make himself available to them even when he was “exhausted and weary,” because that was essential to lead them effectively.
When asked about that passage from the book, Gottschling said, “That sounds more like what the role of a platoon leader or a company commander would be. I mean, if he was in a military police company, that’s what he would have been doing. But that’s not what his role was.”
Asked whether Moore had any troops assigned to him, Gottschling said, “He didn’t have any troops assigned to him.” Gottschling further emphasized that Moore was a brigade staff officer.
“You don’t really lead staff officers. You coordinate with staff officers,” Gottschling said.
The record behind the résumé
Spotlight’s May 17 report examined additional discrepancies. In a 2014 interview with the USO’s in-house magazine “On Patrol,” Moore said he had been an infantry officer, a military police officer and then “became special ops” with the 82nd, which is not true. His military records establish qualification only as a Military Police officer, not as an infantry, special operations or information operations officer.
That story also examined Moore’s glowing 2006 officer evaluation report, which described him as a “Top 1% officer,” and compared his abilities with those of experienced majors and lieutenant colonels. The report contained errors in his rank and military specialty. Gottschling, Moore’s rater, said evaluations routinely included inflated praise to help soldiers advance and that Moore shouldn’t take what Gottschling and Fenzel wrote in his evaluation too seriously.
“There’s a lot of embellishment with that, but that’s just how the system was,” he said. “You’re not trying to be deceitful about it, but you want to elevate what they did (your soldiers) so they can get their next job or next promotion.”
Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel, left, and retired Army Lt. Col. James “Jamie” Gottschling, right, are shown after physical training during their deployment to Afghanistan. (Submitted by James Gottschling)
Comparing his own evaluation report to Moore’s inflated evaluation, Gottschling said, “I wouldn’t read my own and say that was really who I was.”
In his assessment today of Moore’s performance in Afghanistan, he said, “He did everything that he was called to do. There were never any issues with his performance over there.”
Gottschling takes issue with Moore not over his service in Afghanistan, but over what happened after he returned home, when Moore began falsely portraying himself as a paratrooper and combat leader to burnish his public image and establish a political career.
“It’s the embellishment of the actions that really just contribute to his narrative, to his story, to his accolades, and it’s self-promotion, it’s self-aggrandizement,” Gottschling said.
Gottschling also confirmed that the duration of Moore’s deployment also differs sharply from his public accounts. In multiple interviews, Moore has said he spent anywhere from 10 to 13 months in Afghanistan. His Army records, however, document six months and 27 days in country, Aug. 15, 2005, to March 14, 2006. Emergency leave following his grandfather’s death kept him away for approximately another month, further reducing his actual time there to roughly six months.
The combat story
Spotlight’s May 31 report examined perhaps the most consequential difference between Moore’s accounts and Gottschling’s. Moore claims he led soldiers in combat and experienced direct fire engagements with the enemy.
In a May 2022 social media post, Moore wrote that he had “led soldiers into combat in Afghanistan.” In “The Work,” he recounted bullets striking the ground around him during a firefight. In a 2021 interview, he described leading paratroopers and witnessing a firefight soon after arriving. These stories are complete fabrications.
Before locating Gottschling, Spotlight searched and found no after-action reports, witness accounts or other military records substantiating that Moore led soldiers in a direct-fire engagement. Moore received a Combat Action Badge for a minor indirect rocket attack at FOB Salerno on Dec. 9, 2005, that resulted in no soldiers being injured. He did not receive it for the firefights he later described.
Once reporters located Gottschling, he quickly confirmed for Spotlight that Moore never saw combat.
“I like to say that we’re combat veterans, but we’re not veterans of combat,” he said of their brigade headquarters service.
He acknowledged that Moore sometimes left the base to coordinate with Afghan officials but said those trips never resulted in any hostile action.
“When you’re talking about direct combat, leading soldiers that are under hostile fire, and leading them and supporting them, that’s not truthful,” he said.
When Spotlight asked whether he thought Moore was a liar, Gottschling said, “I do.”
His criticism is not that Moore failed to serve or failed at his assigned job. It is that the true nature of the service Gottschling supervised — worthwhile headquarters work in an office during a war — has been repeatedly described to the public by Moore as something else.
“I think he can be very proud of that,” Gottschling said of Moore’s actual service. “It’s just really the embellishment of the story after that that’s the issue.”
Drew Sullins can be reached at [email protected]. Spotlight on Maryland is a joint venture by FOX45 News, The Baltimore Sun and WJLA in Washington, D.C. Send story tips to [email protected] or call our hotline at (410) 467-4670. Follow us on X at @SpotlightMDNews, and on Instagram and Facebook at Spotlight on Maryland.
