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He never expected to become famous and certainly never admitted to wanting to be famous. He’d studied men like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, who had sought fame and described its strange, arbitrary workings. But by the time Matt Damon name-checked Gordon S. Wood on “the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization” in Good Will Hunting, Wood had long since become a lightning rod for his fellow historians and the much greater number of others who drafted the American Revolution into the culture wars.

The Brown University professor chuckled about that scene in the film, a story of a working-class Bostonian who mocks a Harvard graduate student as likely to take Wood’s interpretations as gospel only to drop them the very next year. After all, as a Harvard Ph.D. from working-class Concord, Massachusetts, Gordon Wood had been both of these types and more, while keeping a professorial distance from all. No one could say whether, when he repeated the story of how former House Speaker Newt Gingrich handed out copies of his Radicalism of the American Revolution to new members of the Republican caucus, he had been bragging, trolling, or just reading the room.

The prolific historian of early America burst onto the scene 60 years ago with an essay in the field’s flagship journal titled “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution.” Two schools of interpretation had been battling for some time: “neo-whigs,” who saw the patriots as motivated by “constitutional principles,” versus “progressives,” who saw them as motivated by profound socioeconomic change, for all their rhetoric about liberties. Wood, who had been reading up on social theory, brilliantly arbitrated that debate, maintaining that declining opportunities inspired men to fear what changing imperial politics could do to them and their status as provincial Britons. The Revolution had been conservative in its impulses, even if it had unanticipated radical results. Historians needed a “behaviorist” approach that saw revolutionary rhetoric as “psychological” reality.

Wood discovered a remarkable knack for explaining how ideas could be new and old, innovative and conservative, at the same time.

In his own way, Wood opened up the understanding of the Revolution to feelings as well as thoughts, to ideology as well as theory. Meanwhile, he was revising his Harvard doctoral thesis, which became The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787. Published in 1969, this pointillist, essayistic yet comprehensive study tracked how understandings of political structure, including the very idea of constitutions, changed under the pressure of revolutionary war and the formation of state governments. An American revision of classical and seventeenth-century English republicanism informed the fledgling republics. In 1787, experience moderated the democratic spirit of ’76. Wood discovered a remarkable knack for explaining how ideas could be new and old, innovative and conservative, at the same time—and how creative political thinking advanced best under the sometimes self-deceiving cover of restoration.

Out of irrationality could come a higher rationality, though not without ironic results. For example, John Adams’s tough-minded insistence that constitutional structures had to reflect the existence of social classes, including aristocrats and plebes, in order to balance them, made him “irrelevant” when enough Americans agreed to disagree, or at least to stop talking about, whether such classes did or should exist.

Wood exaggerated Adams’s unpopularity, but in doing so drove home the sobering point that American republicanism, tending toward Herrenvolk democracy, would have a lot of trouble dealing with the relationship between economic inequality and political power. The course of the 1780s led toward a Madisonian “science of politics” that saved the nation from revolutionary excess yet sought to bury rather than reflect or address economic conflict in its schemes of federalism and representation, creating an American political tradition that couldn’t deal honestly with class or money.

With this flourish, the 35-year old assistant professor performed an acclaimed scholarly triple axel, fashioning a learned interpretation of American origins that seemed to have something for everyone, which was no easier in 1969 than today. At great length and sophistication, he’d offered something to those inclined to celebrate the Constitution, something to those who criticized it, and much to those looking for some way between. The republic, simply put, was moderate yet innovative, advanced and yet caught up in self-deception. Some of the founders were brilliant, yes, but maybe only slightly more so than Gordon S. Wood, who figured out what they knew, what they did, and what they had barely perceived.

Some of the founders were brilliant, yes, but maybe only slightly more so than Gordon S. Wood, who figured out what they knew, what they did, and what they had barely perceived.

Wood caught and rode a wave of sophistication about the workings of ideology. In his hands, disembodied “thought” became culture and politics and made history. One could see it happening in obscure and popular pamphlets, in the plays and newspapers, and in the letters of politicians of the late eighteenth century. Tracing ideological struggle was heady stuff, and the late 1960s and 1970s came to represent something of a golden age for American historians, especially intellectual historians who could claim to explain the motives and worldviews informing critical events. Wood continued to endear himself to scholars with essays that plumbed how understandings of conspiracy and “interests” and “disinterestedness” shaped the debate over the ratification of the Constitution. These turned out to be brilliant middle chapters of his 1991 Pulitzer-winning triptych, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, a work that expanded his interpretation of the emergent American ethos chronologically while keeping republicanism and its tribulations at the center.

“Monarchy” characterized a late colonial era that believed in hierarchy. Social changes undermined those hierarchies in a radically reformative cultural process—“republicanism”— that informed the break from England. Meanwhile, the rise of capitalism further undermined social structures that had never really take strong hold in colonies with more available land and less inherited wealth. Work came to be valued more than lineage; representation in formal, legislative politics mattered more with kings and their appointed governors thrown out. All this dwarfed putative differences between north and south, east and west. The result: The early republic was a society in which democracy and capitalism arose and reinforced each other, much to the disappointment of more rigorously republican politicians who had seen themselves as disinterested men of virtue.

To many readers, Wood had seemingly accounted, in beautiful, measured prose, for both what was radical about the Revolution and why many revolutionaries proceeded to fight for more—or less—of it. One could read Wood as a critic of emergent democracy or even, on the other hand, of capitalism.

Yet as Alfred F. Young, a careful critic, wrote at the time, Wood had not so much distilled the radicalism of the Revolution as magnified it to encompass all of early American history. That sheer interpretative ambition turned out to be an Achilles’ heel. War and violence dissolved in Wood’s egalitarian upsurge. So did settler colonialism and slavery. In the introduction, Wood insisted that it didn’t matter whether political revolution caused or just reflected the social or cultural revolution, and that because it didn’t matter, we should simply credit the radicalism of the revolution for “the anti-slavery and women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century and in fact all our current egalitarian thinking.” This “in fact” made for strange rhetorical alchemy as he continued to stress how exceedingly different late–eighteenth century people were from later Americans.

By the new century, Wood had already begun to complain publicly about a tendency to judge eighteenth-century Americans by what he deemed “presentist” standards. A tense divide over his sometimes enigmatic work and persona ensued, especially among liberals and leftists. Wood’s tendency to lump all Americans together greatly irked a generation of social historians who made regional, class, and urban-rural differences their bread and butter and who worried much less than he did about how to pull American diversity and conflict, not to mention imperial reach, into a common national story. (In a tone-perfect illustration of Wood’s changing reputation among academics, in the 1997 film, Will Hunting first baits the graduate student with the above précis of Wood on radicalism, only to interrupt his predictable response: the regurgitation of a social historian’s comment on how Wood “drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth.”)

Worse, there were very few women, Black people, or Indians in his expansive, transformative, century-long radical revolution. How radical could that be, then? Yet Wood stuck to his guns, even doubling down. It remained “anachronistic” to ask why the patriots didn’t end slavery even as they complained about their political enslavement. Slavery was never questioned until the revolutionaries began to question it, he argued. Those folks simply weren’t part of the American conversation then: The founders didn’t think or talk about them, didn’t consider them as a subject of politics. This explanation held less water when his own definition of revolutionary politics had expanded to include almost everything else besides race and sex.

Wood laid a foundation for a distinctive, genteel kind of “founders” history: one that keeps a quiet distance from uncritical flag-waving by emphasizing at every turn how different the eighteenth century was, still while insisting that everything good about the United States emanated from the founding, even if ironically and unintentionally. Too aware to ignore the threat that alternative histories posed to his mountain of scholarship, he slammed those that bid to take down founder worship, to add other groups to the pantheon of founders, or to dwell on the inegalitarian aspects of what the founders created. He issued a few occasional mild dissents against ahistorical constitutional originalism, but punched left a lot harder and more often than he punched right.

In books like Empire of Liberty, his 2009 entry in the Oxford History of the United States series, and his career-summing Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution (2021), Wood foregrounded the most optimistic and forward-looking revolutionaries, like Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, whose understanding of the Revolution as a transformative event in world history seemed to prove his case. His admiration for “the revolutionary generation”—which had once been a minor, more implicit theme in his scholarship, mitigated by the vast distance he discerned between their world and ours—swelled when he confronted those who identified strongly against a past construed as backwards and racist. Republishing the many review essays he wrote for venues like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books, he added afterwords that cast further aspersions on historians who forwarded their “preoccupation” with race, class, and gender, or failed to preserve the requisite balance and appreciation for the Revolution, where Americans go “to refresh and reaffirm our nationhood.”

Like a number of our best historians—and politicians—he insisted we hang on, for dear national life, to the rhetoric.

Yet after the brouhaha over The 1619 Project, in which he participated as an often-quoted critic, Wood good-naturedly admitted just how much that controversy demonstrated what had been missing from the histories his generation had written.

Americans remain stuck with a revolution we rightly perceive as both radical and conservative. For all his insistence on our revolution’s beneficence and singularity, Gordon Wood helped us see that revolutions are as confusing and contradictory as they are compelling in retrospect and prospect. Their true measure is the never-ending debate over how and whether they remade reality—or just rhetoric. Like a number of our best historians—and politicians—he insisted we hang on, for dear national life, to the rhetoric. “To be an American is not to be someone but to believe in something. And of that something most important is the belief that all men are created equal,” he wrote in a 2019 essay. As it was natural for him to suspect the Revolution’s critics, it’s somewhat tragic that his appreciation of revolutionary minds grappling with possibility could be appropriated for causes he did not fully endorse. No doubt, he appreciated the irony.

SpaceX alumni Andrew Redd is betting the ocean has vast amounts of untapped geothermal energy.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s 26-year-old son-in-law, Michael Alfonso, wants to get into politics just like his dear old father-in-law did. No, not by merit and hard work, silly: by parlaying a vaguely influencerish hard-right background into elected office. And Duffy is going all out to help make that happen. Alfonso has never held a political office of any sort…

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President Trump’s Freedom 250 birthday extravaganza is looking so bleak that entire states are pulling out.

NOTUS has reported that Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Oregon, and North Carolina—the last of which Trump won in 2024—have all declined to send a representative to the president’s 16-day fair on the National Mall. Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Washington remain undecided even as the fair begins just two weeks from now.

Each state is supposed to have a 600-square-foot themed booth with a representative or official sent by state leadership. With these states declining to send one, the administration has decided to pick their own. Multiple states said they had no knowledge as to who was chosen to represent their homes or why.

Other states noted the hefty price attached to the event. Michele Walker, the comms director of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, told NOTUS her state would have to spend a minimum of $100,000 on travel, hotels, and their themed booth all together.

“We decided early in the process that we do not have the capacity to participate,” Walker said. “Our limited resources are focused on America250 events across North Carolina.”

This news comes just a week after nearly all of the first wave of musical performers—from Young MC to the Commodores—dropped out as well. This lack of enthusiasm only reaffirms that this “Freedom 250” event, unlike the educational America250 commission, is just a birthday party for Trump.

President Trump is threatening a ground invasion of Iran.

On Truth Social Thursday morning, Trump posted that the U.S. military “will be hitting Iran (Whose Navy, Air Force, Radar, Anti Aircraft, and all other forms of Defense, together with most of its offensive capability, are GONE!), VERY HARD TONIGHT.

“At some point in the not too distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States of America. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP,” the post read.

Trump’s threats are an alarming escalation, especially considering he previously claimed the U.S. and Iran are close to a deal to end the war. Publicly announcing plans for such an attack also carries risks, as it puts U.S. troops in harm’s way and gives Iran time to prepare countermeasures. Trump could also be bluffing, thinking that the specter of a ground invasion of Iranian territory will force concessions.

That seems to be in line with what he told Fox & Friends Thursday morning. Trump was asked about the post, and complained about media coverage of Iran, claiming the country has been decimated but that news outlets such as The New York Times, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal say that it’s doing well.

“They’re dying to make a deal. They want to make a deal so badly,” Trump said. “We dropped $250 million of bombs on them last night, the whole thing is crazy. And they’re really in submission, they just don’t know it yet.”

Trump on Fox & Friends: "They're dying to make a deal. They want to make a deal so badly. We dropped $250 million of bombs on them last night. They're really in submission. They just don't know it yet." pic.twitter.com/XKW5CGc1CU

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2026

Trump’s daily accounts of the war with Iran are increasingly incoherent, and it’s tough to tell what’s real and what isn’t. Anything could happen Thursday night, and in the meantime, the world will be watching with uncertainty as a man with visible cognitive decline has his finger on the trigger.

Nine years after the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education decision that struck down segregation, Black students Vivian Malone and James A. Hood, flanked by federalized Alabama National Guard troops, confronted racist Gov. George Wallace and entered the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and registered for classes. Wallace, who ran an openly racist campaign that included…

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Dutch semiconductor startup Qualinx is claiming a breakthrough of sorts in European sovereign manufacturing thanks to an end-to-end semiconductor fabrication flow it is using for its new satnav chips. The firm, a spin-off from Delft University of Technology, says it has demonstrated that security-critical chips for aerospace, defense, and critical infrastructure can be designed, manufactured, and delivered entirely within Europe. Tape-out of the Qualinx QLX3xx, a family of ultra-low-power Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) systems-on-chip (SoCs), represents the first step on the path toward a fully automated trusted European manufacturing flow, the company claims. But Qualinx is a fabless design shop and relies on a contract manufacturer to make the chips for it. In this case, it is GlobalFoundries (GF), an international business with its headquarters in the US – so much for sovereign manufacturing. The pair say that GF's Dresden fab is establishing a European manufacturing flow with funding from the European Chips Act. This will ensure that every step of the production process occurs within the EU, so that no sensitive design data leaves the region. "This first secure product demonstrates that a fully European manufacturing path – from mask services to wafer production – is already a reality today," said Qualinx CEO Tom Trill. Qualinx is perhaps placing an emphasis on security-critical chips because there are already European semiconductor firms that design and manufacture their own products, such as STMicroelectronics. And Reg readers with long memories will recall that the UK once had its own processor company in the shape of Bristol-based Inmos, which made the Transputer, manufactured at Newport Wafer Fab (NWF) in South Wales – now sold off to US chip biz Vishay Intertechnology. The Qualinx chip will be made using GF's FDX fully depleted silicon-on-insulator manufacturing process, which we understand is a 12nm node. While advanced, this is some way behind cutting-edge processes such as Taiwanese chip giant TSMC's 2nm N2 process, now in mass production. But there has been debate about whether Europe really needs cutting-edge fabs. The European Commission's new Digital Sovereignty package proposes a Chips Act 2.0 that would fund a sovereign "AI chip factory." But as the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) points out, European chip demand comes mostly from the automotive sector and industrial applications, which rely on 28/22nm technology, not cutting-edge silicon. "We are demonstrating that Europe can rely on a secure, end-to-end semiconductor manufacturing flow that meets the highest requirements of aerospace and defense," stated GF SVP and general manager Dr Manfred Horstmann. "Our partnership with Qualinx marks the first operational milestone." ®

President Donald Trump’s bizarre claim to have secretly moved more than 100 million barrels of oil through the Strait of Hormuz just got shut down by the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

Trump announced Wednesday that he’d directed the military to conduct a “secret mission” to support the flow of energy through the essential trade passageway—as he struggled to justify the U.S. economy reaching its highest annual inflation rate in three years.

Speaking on CNN that night, Connecticut Representative Jim Himes, who serves as ranking member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, dismissed the president’s claim.

“A lot of that is just flat-out untrue,” Himes said.

CNN: What do you know about what he's saying that Iran didn't until right now didn’t know that we're taking millions of barrels of oil. And this 100 million barrels that Trump says he's actually helped get through the strait.

Himes: A lot of that is just flat out untrue. Let's… pic.twitter.com/IamnOmqSfB

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 10, 2026

“And remember the record here, right. This war was going to be over in a couple of days. For the last three months the Iranians have been two or three days, or maybe a week or two weeks away from striking a deal,” Himes said. “So, let’s just agree that the president has precisely zero credibility on anything that he says about the Iran war.

“But look, you don’t need to be an intelligence expert to understand that in the Strait of Hormuz, you’re not moving anything in secret. With a good pair of binoculars on either coast you can see what’s happening.”

Himes isn’t the only one calling B.S. on the president’s claims: Energy Secretary Chris Wright appeared not to have a clue what Trump was talking about, either.

When asked about the 100 million barrels of oil during a House committee hearing Wednesday, Wright appeared confused and said he was “unaware” of the operation.

“I do not think the president is lying, I think the president is talking casually about our efforts to stop the flow of Iranian oil,” Wright claimed, though Trump was clearly talking about oil that had made it out of the strait, not oil that had been blocked.

Donald Trump’s health has hit a new milestone.

The president’s latest examination at Walter Reed Medical Center on May 26 reportedly involved 22 specialists, reported The Washington Post. That puts Trump at a dozen specialists beyond the previous record held by George W. Bush, who once saw 10 specialists in one go.

The White House has not elaborated on exactly why Trump needed so many doctors. Trump officials told the Post that the unconventionally large medical team allowed for a “complete and preventive evaluation” of the president. White House physician Sean Barbabella commented that the assessment found Trump in “excellent health.”

“The involvement of multiple specialists reflects a comprehensive, multidisciplinary evaluation consistent with best practices for executive-level medical care,” the White House said in a statement.

Nonetheless, the figure has contributed to yet more intrigue about Trump’s health as he nears his 80th birthday.

“It is an extraordinary number,” Jonathan Reiner, a longtime cardiologist for former Vice President Dick Cheney, told the Post. “What specialties do they represent? Why so many?”

Trump is the second-oldest man to ever serve as America’s commander in chief, and his increasingly erratic behavior has sparked global concern in recent weeks about his stability and judgment. The 79-year-old has spent hours at Walter Reed Medical Center on multiple occasions over the last nine months, fallen asleep during more than a dozen critical meetings, seemed lost and disoriented around foreign heads of state, frequently slurred his speech, and appeared with discolored and bruised skin on several occasions.

His behavior has also grown increasingly erratic, as he has thrown cheap and petty insults at members of the press, challenged long-standing U.S. alliances, and even taken jabs at the pope.

The American public is apparently wising up to Trump’s age: A Washington Post–ABC News–Ipsos poll released last month found that 59 percent of Americans do not believe that Trump has the mental acuity to lead the country.

South Korean authorities issued the record-breaking fine following a data breach that affected over 30 million customers.

I grew up in a household of women who didn’t talk much about their reproductive health. Period talks were reserved for hushed tones, always behind closed doors. But over the years, stories began to emerge: A relative clocking into work despite her stomach being so swollen with fibroids she appeared pregnant; a childhood friend excelling in school while doctors dismissed her chronic pain and missing periods as “anxiety”; a family member’s miscarriage garnering little sympathy from nurses.

Black women have long been forced to grin and bear reproductive pain until it becomes unbearable—just like the data has been telling us: By age 50, 90 percent of Black people with uteruses in the United States report having fibroids and often have severe symptoms like anemia and intense pain. Black women are not only more likely to have uterine cancer, but twice as likely to die from it than non-Black women. Black women are also three to four times more likely to die in childbirth. It’s a crisis that transcends economic and education boundaries, with celebrities like Beyoncé and Serena Williams experiencing near-fatal pregnancy complications.

I spoke with Dr. Kemi Doll, author of the new book A Terrible Strength: The Hidden Crisis of the Black Womb and Your Survival Guide to Healing, about what Black women can do to educate ourselves about our reproductive health and how we can advocate for ourselves in our gyno offices and beyond. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

One of the main points you bring up is how breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and our ongoing maternal mortality crisis are reproductive issues that make headlines. But with uterine cancer, the disparity in Black women doesn’t receive that same attention from the public. Why is that? 

I have a lot of ideas about this. Part of it is that all of us, the public included, are so used to not talking about “down there.” So we don’t. We eliminate that world in a woman’s life unless she’s pregnant, unless we can tie it to something like bringing life into this world. But then we see this [lack of care] played out on a larger scale, where you have this cancer disparity.

Uterine cancer is the worst cancer disparity that we have that affects women. We’re getting more cases every year. But the level of dialogue and awareness doesn’t match the gravity of the crisis. It’s an example of what I’m talking about: the power of silencing. It’s why I’m so passionate about talking about the womb in the realm beyond giving birth and beyond being pregnant, because we all spend most of our time not pregnant, and we all deal with these conditions every day.  It’s beyond time to stop that silencing and suppression.

I think that it connects right back to how, when a girl has her first period, you teach her how to hide it. That a successful period is one that nobody knows is happening. That goes all the way up to a uterine cancer epidemic and a disparity among Black women that nobody knows is happening. Those things are connected.

Let’s talk about the misogynoir that Black women face: the expectation to be stoic, to be high achievers, and excellent. Can you talk about this and how that stereotype affects Black women and their reproductive health?

One hundred percent. I think we have to understand where we came from with this history. At the beginning of obstetrics and gynecology, physicians were giving insurance policies on enslaved Black women to say: This woman can reproduce. It was a field that was essentially looking at Black women’s bodies only through the lens of how well this body can reproduce.

After Emancipation, when Black bodies are no longer directly profitable, there is no interest in the continued health and well-being of that body. When this is the history of gynecology, these reproductive disparities make sense.

In this system, Black women’s wombs and our reproductive health are not a priority. What that means is that we have decades of research that haven’t focused on the conditions that most strongly affect Black women. It means that when we develop treatments, solutions, clinical protocols, and guidelines, we do not consider how they would impact or how they would work or not on Black women. That misogynoir is so deep, and it’s on so many levels that I understand the strength that Black women have to have. Your pain is not read. Your vulnerability is not legible. We literally can’t see it. So it means that Black women suffer in silence, and we call it endurance. I don’t think you tell the story of gynecology itself if you don’t tell the story of the suffering of the Black womb and this crisis.

“When a girl has her first period, you teach her how to hide it. That a successful period is one that nobody knows is happening. That goes all the way up to a uterine cancer epidemic and a disparity among Black women. “

One of my favorite aspects of the book was how you weaved in the more clinical and informative parts with the very human stories of Black women’s reproductive health. Can you talk about how you decided to add these women’s stories and what it was like interviewing them?

The Black tradition is a storytelling tradition. Ain’t nobody tell a story like Black people can tell a story. So, I’m harnessing all the tools in my toolbox to be able to communicate long-overdue information. I’ve recognized that there’s a huge gap to bridge between what my field of gynecology has done to Black women and the information that I need to impart.

I am a qualitative researcher, so I do interviews as part of my research work on the scientific side. I knew each of these women that I profiled. But what was really profound is that every time I left an interview session, I left with a completely different level of understanding because I asked them so specifically about their womb.

We have access to another layer of understanding each other, and Black women need each other in these times. We need bonds that are unshakable in these times. I felt like I learned about all of these women even more, and the respect and love for them that I had grown.

Let’s talk about that historical expectation of excellence and stoicism, and how it plays a role in the disproportionate rates of uterine cancer in Black women.

One of the reasons why all the women [profiled in the book] are so incredible and high-achieving is that it’s really important to change the face of what suffering looks like. I can tell you from the medicine side, we have a certain image in our head of what a woman in pain looks like. What does a woman suffering look like? And Black women don’t get to look like that. We can’t walk around with that kind of vulnerability.

When you can imagine the other things that are on a Black woman’s plate, and then when you imagine what the threshold is that we have to hit before we are really saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I need help,” we are unfortunately just managing and dealing with that symptom for months and years before being seen.  What that means is that Black women are showing up with stage three and four cancers, when it’s not curable.

What are some early signs of uterine cancer that people should watch out for?

The cardinal sign is postmenopausal bleeding. The formal definition is that if it’s been 12 months since your last cycle and you are of menopausal age, and then you start bleeding again, that is the number one most common sign of uterine cancer. It’s usually not a full period; it’s a few little spots. It doesn’t mean you have cancer, just like a lump in your breast does not mean you have breast cancer, but it does mean you need to go get it checked out. Another thing that we see is that, especially in Black women who are more likely to have irregular cycles, [potential signs of uterine cancer] are heavier cycles as they get older, instead of lighter.

Number three is fatigue. This is where I start talking in the book about whether Black women even know when we have fatigue. Do we even know when we’re tired? Because, again, the way that we can endure. Another sign is pelvic pressure. Bleeding after sex, in your fifties and sixties, is another sign. We also don’t talk about that. We act like older women don’t get it in. Meanwhile, I am like, “Girl, I don’t care what you’re doing, but if you’re bleeding after sex, I need to see you.”

Even before Trump’s second term, little funding went into women’s reproductive health, with less than 8 percent of funding for the National Institutes of Health going toward women’s health research in 2023. This, paired with the cuts to reproductive health research on top of the DEI initiatives by our current administration, seems ominous.

It does concern me because we’re not just missing out on these years of research right now. We’re missing out on a compound of research discoveries. A study that was canceled today would have had some output in two years, four years, and five years, and then that would have led to more discoveries. All of those things down the line are now delayed by potentially decades. It’s really sad. On the other hand, there are those of us in this field who are not going anywhere. I’m still running my research lab. We’re still figuring out funding. We’re still getting creative. Our devotion is to Black women and the Black womb, and we are going to continue to use science to improve things, period.

Can you talk about the historical background and current medical racism that has led to this generational distrust of the medical system among Black women specifically?

How much time do you have? I tell a lot more stories to educate people about just how much mistreatment there had been in gynecology specific to Black women’s bodies, and this idea that Black women were more appropriate to experiment on than white women, and all these things, so I do think it’s important to educate. But I don’t think as a Black woman you need to know that history to know that when you walk into a doctor’s office, especially when it’s about the womb, that you are on guard. You are on guard for being dismissed, being neglected, because it is such a vulnerable position to be in when you are seeking care in that way, right? These are the intimate parts of ourselves that we often don’t talk to other people about. We have to tell stories that might be difficult, in all of these ways. 

It’s so vulnerable, and yet you’re entering into a system that would happily just dismiss you, that you have probably been dismissed by, or you know somebody who has. Medical racism is very much alive. It’s with a great deal of responsibility and gravity that I say, Black women, you need to go to the gynecologist. I will tell you that as a gynecologic oncologist, as a cancer physician, I want you to live.

Held indefinitely, immigrants imprisoned in Eswatini lack medical attention, food and clothing, according to complaint. By Kate Morrissey for Capital & Main A military plane carrying five U.S. immigrants took off from Djibouti in July 2025. Its destination was Eswatini, a small country nestled on the border between South Africa and Mozambique. Ruled by a king…

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OpenAI may be headed for Wall Street, but one analyst firm is already warning enterprise customers not to get too attached. In a note published alongside OpenAI's confidential IPO filing, Forrester urged companies to keep their AI options open, arguing that today's market leader could easily become tomorrow's cautionary tale. "Don't lock into long-term contracts; keep your architectures flexible," the firm advised. "In fact, OpenAI could become AI's BlackBerry FIFO (First In, First Out). The company that defines a category is often the one most painfully displaced by it." The caution comes as OpenAI takes its first formal step toward a public listing. Alongside its confidential SEC filing, the company published a roadmap built around three ambitions: AI systems that can accelerate research, AI that boosts economic growth, and eventually a personal AGI assistant for everyone. Forrester was more interested in a fourth question: what happens if OpenAI doesn't stay on top? The firm argues that OpenAI faces what it calls a "trifecta" of challenges: persuade consumers to use its agents instead of rivals', convince enterprises to build around its technology, and stay ahead in the race toward AGI. The enterprise battle may prove the most lucrative. "Whoever automates the dull, expensive middle of a company's operations first becomes the system of record everyone else has to rip out — and almost no one does,” Forrester said. In other words, the first company to get AI agents woven into day-to-day business processes stands a decent chance of becoming yet another piece of software that everyone complains about, but nobody can remove. However, Forrester's advice is that, rather than standardizing on a single provider, enterprises should "anchor to the capability you need — not the brand that got there first — and keep your switching costs low." The warning also comes as OpenAI reportedly weighs cutting prices to fend off growing competition from rivals, including Anthropic. If the AI market is heading for a price war, enterprises may want to think twice before chaining themselves to a single supplier. Forrester also notes that a public listing could provide customers with something they currently lack: visibility into OpenAI's finances. Once public, the company would be required to disclose far more information about the cost of training and operating its models, giving enterprise buyers a clearer picture of the economics behind the AI systems they increasingly depend on. For now, OpenAI remains the company that helped define the generative AI era. Whether it becomes the next Google, the next Microsoft, or AI's answer to BlackBerry is a question investors will soon be paying very close attention to. ®

Oracle has lifted capital spending plans above analyst estimates and expanded borrowing to chase the opportunity it says exists in building datacenters for AI workloads. Despite revenue for Q4 (ended May 31) rising 21 percent year-on-year to $19.2 billion, Oracle's share price fell as markets reacted to its increasing capex, as analysts raised concerns about how Big Red would fund the investments in datacenters. Capex for fiscal 2026 reached $55.7 billion, up from $21.2 billion a year earlier. Speaking to investors, CFO Hilary Maxson said Oracle planned to support its capital investments program by raising around $40 billion in debt and equity in fiscal 2027, including a $20 billion equity issuance already announced. "We don't anticipate raising additional debt funding in calendar year 2026," she said. Last year, Oracle raised $18 billion in debt to help fund its massive datacenter investments. Big Red's market value jumped after it declared $455 billion remaining performance obligations (RPOs) – contracted revenue not yet recognized – more than 300 percent higher than a year earlier. That figure reportedly includes $300 billion for OpenAI alone, as the LLM slinger tries to support its expansion with compute capacity. Maxson said on an earnings call this week: "In order to unlock this unique growth opportunity, we started a program of capital investments. We'll continue those investments in our fiscal year 2027, with an expected net cash outlay for capital expenditures of around $70 billion. This includes customer prepayments and timing impacts expected at around $20 billion-$25 billion, so our reported capex will be higher by this amount." CEO Clay Magouyrk said any increase in capex was not due to component prices but largely due to timing. "Part of my job is to figure out ways to actually accelerate capex. My job is to try to spend the money a little bit faster so I can get ramped revenue sometimes. Component prices in general… I think everyone knows that memory prices have definitely gone up, SSD prices, hard drive prices, etc." However, Magouyrk said Oracle had also been able to lock prices "across the spectrum, whether it be space and power costs, energy costs, people costs, component costs." Oracle added around 400 MW of capacity in Q4 – similar to the last two quarters – and expects to add nearly 1 GW of capacity in fiscal Q1 2027. One analyst told Reuters there is real demand for cloud infrastructure, but the question over how Oracle funds its datacenter expansion "is getting harder, not easier, with capex coming in well above estimates and free cash flow still negative." Oracle announced a number of new customers with its latest financial figures, including a deal for a Fusion HCM system with the US Office of Personnel Management. ®

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London's Metropolitan Police and Apple have agreed to share stolen device identifiers, building intelligence they hope will curb the capital's phone theft epidemic. These identifiers will help both organizations track which stolen devices reconnect to mobile networks, giving law enforcement better insight into where the criminal networks behind the thefts operate. The Met has access to stolen device information, such as serial numbers, provided by victims. Apple has access to data indicating when a device has been reactivated and where it's being used. Together, the two organizations believe this combined intelligence will help stamp down on the thefts that have ravaged London's streets for years, earning the city the unofficial title of "phone theft capital of Europe." "If stolen phones cannot be reactivated, their value collapses, and so does the incentive to steal them," said Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Mark Rowley. "We are driving up the risk for offenders while cutting off the reward. "Policing is playing its part. In the West End, where this crime was most concentrated, phone theft has fallen by 50 percent through relentless, targeted policing. But we have also gone further by working directly with Apple to address the global market that has allowed this crime to thrive. "This is an important step, but it must not stop here. If you are stealing phones in London, the reality is changing fast. The opportunities are shrinking, the risks are rising, and we are determined to dismantle this criminal model completely." The intelligence-sharing pact follows months of pressure on both the Met and tech companies to take action. Dame Chi Onwurah, chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, wrote to Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood in December, asking why companies like Apple had not implemented cloud-based blocking or IMEI-linked device locks. Apple launched Stolen Device Protection in January 2024 and has since expanded default-on protections with the iOS 26.4 update, but there has long been a feeling that not enough was being done to tackle London's phone thefts. Rowley reiterated the ultimatum he issued to tech companies in March, demanding that they implement methods of reducing the value of stolen devices, or the UK will push through legislation. The collaboration with Apple is an extension of that, and the Met said Samsung and Google are also making security changes. Google uses several mitigations, including the need for authentication after a factory reset in order to return devices to working order, and an AI-powered feature that detects when devices are snatched and automatically locks the screen. A spokesperson at Google told The Register: "Android's theft protection features provide added security for billions of people, including Londoners. We have expanded default-on protections for UK devices, such as Remote Lock and Theft Detection, and we assist law enforcement with device recovery. Phone theft causes real distress and harm, and we work closely with the Met to protect all those who use our devices." Samsung said last year that it was working with the Home Office to deploy similar measures to tackle phone thefts. It implemented theft-detection tech similar to Google's that locks the screen when the device registers a possible snatching-related movement. It also requires biometric authentication to make security changes when devices are in unfamiliar locations, among other features. Not enough In spite of these actions, the Met announced today that it has asked the Home Office to start drafting anti-phone-theft legislation. "The Met has asked the Home Office to begin preparing legislation to introduce minimum technical standards so that any phone stolen in the UK is effectively unusable," it said. "These standards are complex, but we must be ready to act if industry fails to deliver. "Public support for stronger measures is clear, with 83 per cent of people backing the permanent blocking of stolen smartphones." It added: "While enforcement activity will continue, the Met is clear that the long-term solution lies in collapsing the criminal market." The Register has asked Apple to comment. A Samsung spokesperson said: "Samsung is fully committed to protecting customers with the very latest anti-theft feature technology. We recognise how distressing phone theft can be and have worked at pace to make a significant amount of security enhancements to help address this issue. "We would also like to reiterate that we have completed several requests from both the Home Office and the Met Police to demonstrate how seriously we take phone theft crime." The spokesperson added: "We believe this issue is a collective responsibility and we will continue to work with key stakeholders to help tackle phone-theft crime." The Met said it has almost halved rates of phone thefts in Westminster, with officers making hundreds of arrests and seizing thousands of devices. Thefts are down 45.8 percent, according to data gathered between January and May, although the picture across the wider city is a little less optimistic. The number of theft and robbery offenses in which a mobile phone was stolen has fallen by 14,000 in the last 12 months, representing an 18 percent decrease from the previous year. So far in 2026, overall offenses are down 20.6 percent compared to the same period in 2025. These arrests and seizures were secured through focused periods of enforcement action, namely through Operation Reckoning sprints, the fifth instalment of which concluded on Wednesday. The ten-day operational crackdown on phone thefts across London began on June 1 and resulted in the arrest of "prolific and violent phone thieves," the execution of search warrants at shops suspected of handling stolen devices, and the deployment of pursuit drivers to detain thieves on e-bikes. One visit to a single shop in April saw officers seize more than 1,000 suspected stolen phones and arrest four men between the ages of 22 and 63 on suspicion of handling stolen goods, as well as drug possession with intent to supply. Operation Reckoning is just one initiative targeting phone theft. The Met said last year that in September it dismantled a phone-robbing gang thought to be responsible for roughly half of all phone thefts in London – part of Operation Echosteep. ®

The partnership will see TCS creating a business unit focused on deploying Anthropic's AI models to its customers.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Solar energy just provided more electricity in the United States than coal for the first time on record—marking a milestone for the rise of renewables in America. 

While gas and nuclear plants still lead the country’s energy mix, solar contributed 12.8 percent of the nation’s electrons in May, according to an analysis of government data by Ember, an energy think tank. Coal, meanwhile, provided just 12.2 percent. Just five years ago, solar was less than half of its current levels and coal was at 20 percent. 

“Overtaking coal for the first month on record shows just how far solar has come, from a niche contributor to the third-largest and fastest-growing source of power in the US electricity system,” said Nicolas Fulghum, senior data analyst at Ember, in a press release. “From Texas to California, markets across the US are betting on solar to meet rising power needs.”

The turnaround comes even as political headwinds have shifted against renewable energy. 

“Spending $700 million to bail out the coal industry is like throwing a lifeline to a ship that has already sunk.”

Last summer, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which rolled back enormous swaths of former President Joe Biden’s landmark climate change legislation, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. And President Donald Trump has actively sought to hinder renewable energy development, even offering to pay at least one oil company $1 billion to stop building its offshore wind projects. 

The latest electricity data comes the same month that the Trump administration announced $700 million in funding for investments in the coal industry. It included money for what would be the country’s first new coal-fired power plants in 13 years—sourced from funds previously dedicated to reducing the country’s dependence on fossil fuels, not deepening it. 

“Today we’re taking historic action to bring down the price of energy and the cost of living for all Americans with the power of clean, beautiful coal,” said Trump, who campaigned on the coal-friendly slogan ‘dig, baby, dig.” 

Ember’s analysis found that coal generation in May was actually up slightly from April, when it hit an all-time low. Its share of the grid will also likely tick up in the summer, as cooling needs peak. But the steady downward trend over the last several years suggests that even all the president’s men might not be able to put the coal industry back together again. 

“Spending $700 million to bail out the coal industry is like throwing a lifeline to a ship that has already sunk,” Lena Moffitt, executive director of the environmental group Evergreen Action, told the Associated Press. Rich Nolan, president and CEO of the National Mining Association disagreed, telling the AP that coal generation helps shield consumers from the impacts of volatile energy prices and supply challenges exacerbated by AI.

Regardless of what coal does, experts believe the solar market will continue its upward march. While installations dropped in 2025 compared to 2024, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association, it still accounted for more than half of all newly installed electricity capacity. Even MAGA influencers are promoting it. 

“We’re going to just keep seeing more and more renewables brought onto the grid,” said Patrick Drupp, director of climate policy at the Sierra Club. “That’s good for people’s wallets, it’s good for their health, it’s good for the planet.”

President Donald Trump’s plummeting popularity has promised a bloodbath for Republicans in this year’s midterm elections. To head off that debacle, party leaders in red states have set off an arms race of political gerrymandering. They’ve made an unprecedented move to redistrict their states before the next census to create new, safe GOP districts that might allow the party to preserve its control of Congress in November’s midterm elections. Blue states like California have responded in kind.

Amid that political tug-of-war, one red state will be holding its first non-gerrymandered congressional election of the 21st century: Utah, which Donald Trump won in 2024 with nearly 60 percent of the vote.

The change has been a long time in the making. Voters first approved Proposition 4, an anti-gerrymandering ballot initiative in 2018. But Republicans in the state legislature, with support from the governor, have gone to extreme lengths to prevent it from going into effect. After eight years of bitter legal battles, Utah courts finally forced the state to follow the law and adopt fair voting districts that will be in effect for the first time this year. As a result, a Democrat has a real shot at winning one of the state’s four congressional seats—an outcome that could help swing control of Congress in November.

The mere possibility of Utah voters sending a single Democrat to Congress has sparked a fierce and desperately devious backlash from state Republicans hell-bent on making sure such an outcome never happens again. Emma Petty Addams, co-executive director of nonpartisan faith-based Mormon Women for Ethical Government, says, “There was, and continues to be, a sense among our leadership in particular that an un-gerrymandered outcome was not favorable to their political future.”

“There was, and continues to be, a sense among our leadership in particular that an un-gerrymandered outcome was not favorable to their political future.”

Despite its reputation as a hard-core conservative state, Utah has sent several Democrats to Congress in the past. In 1992, the state even elected a Democratic woman, Karen Shepherd, who served a single term before she was ousted two years later by the scandal-plagued Enid Waldholtz.

Back then, the state had only three congressional districts, and one of them was mostly limited to Salt Lake City and its suburbs, the state’s largest population center. In 2000, that district elected Jim Matheson, a Blue Dog Democrat whose father, Scott Matheson, was the last Utah Democrat elected to serve as governor in 1980.

But as the GOP nationally grew more radical, Utah Republicans who couldn’t beat Matheson at the ballot box tried to redistrict him out of office. In 2002, they changed his district boundaries to break up Salt Lake City and staple it to rural areas like Vernal or the fast-growing conservative area in Southern Utah, eight hours away.

Much to their chagrin, Matheson continued to win elections, even after the legislature split Salt Lake County into four different districts in 2010. In 2014, he gave up and retired after 14 years. But his district remained somewhat competitive. The late Republican Mia Love won the seat that year but lost it in 2018 to former Salt Lake County mayor Ben McAdams, who served one term before losing to former NFL player and Fox News commentator Burgess Owens in 2020. In 2020, the state legislature redrew the maps again to ensure that no Democrat could ever be elected to Congress.

The Utah state legislature has been able to do this because Republicans have a veto-proof supermajority, even though the state’s demographics have changed dramatically. The legislature is also more than 80 percent male, nearly 90 percent Mormon, and 98 percent white. Yet Utah is now about 16 percent Latino, only about 60 percent LDS, and increasingly liberal. Brigham Young University professor Jacob Rugh has calculated that since 2004, Utah has swung left more than any other state in the country—by about 24 points. Even Provo, home of BYU, where Mitt Romney won about 85 percent of the vote in the 2012 presidential election, gave Trump only 56 percent of its vote in 2024.

MAPS BELOW:Note similarity of 2004 & 2012 Bush/Romney marginsWHAT A DIFFERENCE 20 YEARS MAKES IN PROVOUtah swings BLUE more than any other state since 2004D +24Utah County swings blue more than any other county in UtahD +36Provo swings blue more than any city in UtahD +52!

— Jacob S. Rugh (@jakerugh.bsky.social) 2025-03-13T22:40:53.323Z

Salt Lake City has become so liberal that democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) won the Democratic presidential primaries there in 2016 and again in 2020. Kamala Harris beat Trump in Salt Lake by 23 points even as she lost the rest of the state by more than 20. Yet none of those shifts are reflected in the state’s congressional delegation, which is currently made up entirely of white Republican men.

In 2018, Utah voters tried to change all that when they approved a ballot initiative to require an independent redistricting commission to draw nonpartisan maps. The measure also banned the state legislature from unfairly advantaging one party in redistricting. Almost as soon as Prop. 4 passed, the state legislature moved to repeal it, and in 2021, the legislature once again cracked Salt Lake into four GOP-dominant districts.

The next year, eight groups, including the League of Women Voters and Mormon Women for Ethical Government, sued the legislature, arguing that the repeal of Prop. 4 violated the state constitution. In 2024, the Utah Supreme Court ruled in their favor and sent the case back to the trial court for more litigation over the maps. In response, the legislature tried unsuccessfully to amend the state constitution to ban citizen-initiated ballot initiatives.

Finally, in August last year, Judge Diana Gibson ruled that the legislature had violated the state constitution and gave it a month to come up with new maps that complied with the law in time for the 2026 election. The ruling ignited a national firestorm on the right. “How did such a wonderful Republican State like Utah, which I won in every Election, end up with so many Radical Left Judges?” Trump said on Truth Social. “All Citizens of Utah should be outraged at their activist Judiciary, which wants to take away our Congressional advantage, and will do everything possible to do so.”

“How did such a wonderful Republican State like Utah, which I won in every Election, end up with so many Radical Left Judges?”

Instead of following the judge’s order, the legislature once again drew partisan district maps; Gibson once again threw them out. She ruled that the 2026 election would be governed by the nonpartisan maps created by the independent redistricting commission. Rather than accept the ruling, members of the state legislature immediately moved to impeach Gibson, who received death threats, along with many court employees. They also appealed her decision, with support from Republican Gov. Spencer Cox.

“The Utah Constitution clearly states that it is the responsibility of the Legislature to divide the state into congressional districts,” Cox wrote on social media. “While I respect the Court’s role in our system, no judge, and certainly no advocacy group, can usurp that constitutional authority. For this reason, I fully support the Legislature appealing the Court’s decision.”

The Washington County commission, in southern Utah, even voted in January to ignore Gibson’s order entirely, despite being advised by their own lawyer that they would be out of compliance with state law. “I think she’s guilty of criminal conspiracy for conspiring with democratic socialists, and with outside money to try to flip a district in a state and basically control Congress,” fumed Commissioner Victor Iverson, calling Gibson “that lady who shouldn’t even be on the bench.”

In February, the Utah Supreme Court unanimously rejected the legislature’s appeal, but it didn’t result in a ceasefire. In December, the head of the state GOP and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) had started a group called Utahns for Representative Government to repeal Prop. 4 through a ballot initiative.

The enterprise was run by a dark money group aligned with Trump that, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, funneled more than $4 million into the campaign and helped bring in out-of-state workers to gather petitions needed to get the measure on the ballot. It generated a host of complaints from people who alleged that they’d been tricked into signing it, thinking they were actually opposing gerrymandering. Good-government groups launched a grassroots effort to encourage people to withdraw their signatures if they felt they’d signed in error.

The measure failed to get on the ballot, and the election has proceeded. And now, for the moment, at least, the prospect of actually winning an election has invigorated the state’s long-moribund Democratic Party. Four candidates are currently on the primary ballot for the new 1st congressional district, and the state even saw a televised debate among them last month—an event that hasn’t happened since 2010. “It’s definitely a win for the people of Utah to finally have something they voted for working,” says Elizabeth Rasmussen, executive director of Better Boundaries, the bipartisan organization that spearheaded Prop. 4.

Former Rep. Ben McAdams looks poised to return to Congress. But Republicans seem committed to ensuring that even if he does get elected, he won’t serve another term. As state judges have repeatedly blocked Republicans’ campaign to undo Prop. 4, GOP officials have focused on undermining the independence of Utah courts.

“The legislature is really losing its stranglehold on Utah, and they do not want to be politically accountable.”

“The legislature is really losing its stranglehold on Utah, and they do not want to be politically accountable,” says Teneille Brown, a University of Utah law professor who helped found Co-Equal Utah, a nonprofit focused on protecting the state courts from political pressure. “Their relentless tactics are really evidence of why we really need better boundaries.”

Brown says Utah’s judges have historically been considered some of the best in the nation, largely because they have been selected on merit. A bipartisan judicial nominating commission was charged with identifying candidates for the governor to select from. But in 2023, the legislature removed the requirements for the commission to include Democrats and members recommended by the state bar. Now, the panel that selects appellate judges is entirely Republican, and includes members like Sen. Mike Lee’s nephew, who graduated from BYU law school in 2020, as well as the board chairman of the right-wing Sutherland Institute, a Utah think tank.

With that new system in place, Republicans have launched an attack on the judges who had decided the gerrymandering case. Utah holds retention elections for judges, and the GOP has actively urged voters to reject the Supreme Court judges who upheld the maps. They also instigated a particularly nasty smear campaign against Justice Diana Hagan.

Last year, Hagan had been involved in an ugly divorce, and her ex-husband had alleged to a friend that she had been having an affair with one of the lawyers who worked on the anti-gerrymandering litigation. Hagan was friends with the lawyer, but she had recused herself from any case in which he was involved. Nonetheless, her ex-husband’s friend, who has worked in the Trump administration, filed a complaint against Hagan with the Judicial Conduct Commission.

Hagan vehemently denied the affair allegations. After investigating, the commission found “very little credibility to this complaint” and dismissed it. The commission’s investigative report was supposed to be confidential, but the state legislature leaked it to a local news outlet, prompting Cox and the state legislature to demand an “independent” investigation.

The ensuing publicity, and a host of death threats, made Hagan’s life so miserable that in early May, she decided to resign. “[M]y family and friends did not choose public life,” she wrote to Cox in her resignation letter. “They do not deserve to have intensely personal details surrounding the painful dissolution of my thirty-year marriage subjected to public scrutiny.”

Meanwhile, in January, the legislature voted to expand the state supreme court by two additional judges, even though the existing court said it didn’t need more help. This month, Cox appointed two men with no judicial experience to fill the seats, including a senior counsel for the LDS church. Once the new judges are in place, it seems inevitable that the state legislature will go back to court to challenge the district maps to ensure that the 2026 midterm election will be the last time Utah Democrats have a shot at sending someone to Congress.

This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.

“Who knows what was going on in Corporal Mobley’s personal life?”

The question hung in the air. 

“Who knows if he had a girlfriend, fiancée? Who knows if they were having relationship issues? Who knows if his parents were having relationship issues?” 

First Sgt. Christopher Rushton fired off the list of “who knows” as members of the Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting unit at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia sat in stony silence. 

“Who knows if his sister was having relationship issues? Who knows if his favorite dog died? Who knows if his favorite teacher just got in a car wreck and died?”

“Who the fuck knows that?” demanded Rushton, a drill instructor for more than a decade. “Do any of y’all? So how are you going to sit here and try to tell me, or tell the CO, that this environment caused [the death of] Corporal Mobley?”

Active-duty service members and veterans thinking of harming themselves can get free crisis care. Contact the Military Crisis Line at 988, then press 1, or access online chat by texting 838255. People who are not in the military can also call 988.

On April 7, 2025, one of their own—Cpl. Drew Mobley—had taken his own life. 

During an internal investigation after Mobley’s death, a number of his fellow Marines complained about the command climate, accusing leadership of tormenting Mobley after an injury sidelined him from regular duty and ignoring his declining mental health.

Drew Mobley graduated from Marine Corps boot camp at Paris Island in February 2022. Courtesy of April Mobley

Now, three days after Mobley’s memorial service, the rest of his unit—known as ARFF—was getting grilled. Rushton and Col. Scott Warman had gathered the Marines, collected their phones, and were taking turns berating them. The closed-door meeting lasted more than two hours. Secret audio recordings, later shared with The War Horse, reveal what happened inside.

 A War Horse investigation into the events surrounding Cpl. Mobley’s death points to systemic failures before and after his suicide and an alarming disregard for protocols spelled out in 98 pages of Marine Corps Suicide Prevention System Procedures. After inquiries from The War Horse, the Corps said it is investigating.

In the secret recording, Rushton is heard reading aloud and mocking individual Marines’ written concerns with command leaders: “Oh, Mas. Ser. [master sergeant] yelled at me. I’m sad. Boo-the-fuck-hoo. You really think ISIS cares?” 

At one point later, he tells them: “Call CNN. Call Fox News. See how that works out for you.”

And he insisted Mobley’s fellow Marines had no idea why he took his own life.

“He made a very personal decision,” Rushton sternly told the Marines, “to turn a temporary problem into a permanent solution. Very deliberate in what he did.”

“You can’t sit here and tell me that ARFF was the reason that he did what he did,” Rushton told them. “Do any of you have a suicide note from him?”

Again, silence.

“No, you don’t,” Rushton finally said. “You don’t know what was going through his head.”

First Sgt. Christopher Rushton became the senior enlisted leader of Marine Corps Air Facility Quantico in December 2024. Lance Cpl. Ethan Miller/U.S. Marine Corps

‘Not Going the Way We Thought’

For years, the military has been struggling to come to grips with an alarming number of suicides among service members. Suicide rates have climbed in the military since 2011, but, in a glimmer of hope, declined in 2024, in the most recent Defense Department report. Still, there were 471 suicides—more than one a day—in the US military in 2024. And the Marine Corps has among the military’s highest rates. Studies and the Marines’ prevention protocols warn that exposure to suicide can lead to a higher risk for similar behavior.

In February, Sgt. Maj. Carlos A. Ruiz, the Corps’ highest-ranking enlisted member, encouraged Marines in a social media video to speak up if they are struggling with their mental health. 

“This tribe demands that when you need help, you ask for help,” he said. “We bend together, and we don’t break together.”

Veterans interviewed for this story say, despite its suck-it-up image, the Corps has made strides in looking out for troubled Marines in recent years. But what happened at Quantico last April provides a rare and unvarnished look into a culture that critics say can persist on the inside when unit-level commanders think nobody else is listening.

Over four months, The War Horse spoke to six Marines who worked in ARFF with Mobley. In interviews, they described working long hours for an understaffed unit, missing time with their families, and toxic leadership that dismissed their mental health concerns. The Marines who spoke with The War Horse also noted that Mobley’s death was the third suicide in the Marine Corps Air Facility, which includes ARFF, in less than two years.

The Marines who spoke out had hoped their feedback would hold ARFF’s leadership accountable for their perceived role in Mobley’s death, which Michael Snell, a former ARFF unit member, calls “horribly preventable.”

“The maltreatment had been going on forever and was getting ignored, and by literally everyone in the command,” Snell said in an interview with The War Horse. “And we basically all got told that we’re committing acts of mutiny.” 

The Mobleys assembled a memorial to Drew at their home in Wallace, North Carolina, after his death in 2025.Courtesy of April Mobley

“We kind of all knew the moment they said, ‘Everybody put your phones outside’—we were like, ‘Oh, this is not going the way we thought it was going to go,’” said Malakai Standifer, another former ARFF Marine. 

The War Horse reached out multiple times over a two-month period to four members of ARFF leadership—Warman, Rushton, Master Sgt. Jerry Chapman III, and Gunnery Sgt. Brian Tabares. Rushton and Warman directed inquiries to the Quantico communication office. The others did not respond.

“Berating Marines weeks after the third suicide in two years—that just sounds like the worst possible way to handle this. Your first instinct should be, pull those guys into your arms and go, ‘Hey, let’s take care of you.’”

After The War Horse submitted more than a dozen questions, detailing the allegations and sharing a number of Rushton’s and Warman’s comments from the closed-door meeting, a Marines’ spokesman responded: “This incident is currently under investigation, and no details regarding the investigation can be provided at this time.”   

Rob Bracknell, a retired Marine officer and judge advocate, reviewed the recordings of the meeting at the request of The War Horse. He was not involved in the investigation.

“Berating Marines weeks after the third suicide in two years—that just sounds like the worst possible way to handle this,” Bracknell said. “Your first instinct should be, pull those guys into your arms and go, ‘Hey, let’s take care of you.’”

Drew Mobley was 9 when his third-grade essay about wanting to grow up to be a Marine won a Duplin County School District essay contest.Courtesy of April Mobley

‘Be a Marine and Protect Earth’

When Drew Mobley ended his life at 22, he was working what was supposed to be his dream job.

He’d known it since he was just a third grader. At Wallace Elementary in North Carolina, an hour’s drive east of Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, he wrote an essay on what he wanted to be when he grew up.

“I am going to be a Marine and protect [E]arth,” he wrote. “No one is stopping me until I die or end the war.”

His essay won a contest for the Duplin County School District. 

More than a decade later, Mobley was at Quantico on a Sunday afternoon. He updated his life insurance policy in the ARFF rec room. He played basketball for a bit with a few of his fellow Marines. He went to a sporting goods store, where he purchased a gun, and another store to purchase hollow-point bullets. Then, he drove his Hyundai Sonata to the parking lot of the C.F. Phelps Wildlife Management Area. Around 6:30 p.m., he messaged some of his friends on Discord, a social app he liked to use, telling them he’d be offline for a while. His internet search history shows he was on his phone until after midnight. 

Then, sometime in the early morning hours, he shot himself. 

A few Marines who were sent to check on him discovered his body after friends tracked his location on Snapchat.

Drew Mobley was put on dispatch duty after injuring his leg during physical training.Courtesy of April Mobley Drew Mobley, center, enjoys an outing with fellow Marine Sgt. Warren Engdahl, left, and Cpl. Michael Snell. Engdahl was among a group of Marines who discovered Drew’s body after friends tracked his location on Snapchat.Courtesy of Michael Snell

His mother later pieced together the last hours of his life from Drew’s phone log, receipts, and accounts from other Marines. In the months leading up to his death, Mobley was struggling, fellow Marines say, but they didn’t know how bad it was. He started isolating himself. His hair appeared unwashed. He arrived late to his shifts. He stopped wearing cologne. 

“The boy loved cologne,” said his mother, April Mobley. “And always wore it.” 

They checked in regularly on the phone, but he never told her how much he was suffering. “My son was not a complainer,” she said. “He didn’t share his feelings.” She remembers him telling her, after two other Marines’ suicides, that he didn’t understand why they would take their own lives. On their last phone call, he told her he was worried about his friend Cole McEachern, another ARFF Marine who was struggling. 

Drew Mobley felt like he’d lost his purpose on base, Standifer said. At first, he’d enjoyed his job, April Mobley said. He made friends and had earned a nickname, Horse, because he’d “kinda just roam and graze and do [his] own thing,” Snell said—random, but it stuck. When he left work, the other Marines would joke that they were “letting Horse out of the stable.” Later, Snell got a tattoo of a horse and the date of Mobley’s death on his shoulder.

In September 2023, a little over a year out of boot camp, Mobley broke his leg and tore his ACL while playing football during physical training. In February 2024, he had surgery to repair his ACL, but his leg didn’t heal as expected. He was eventually placed on limited duty.

It kept him from the airfield, where Marines trained for and responded to aircraft emergencies. Quantico is also home to Marine One, the president’s helicopter.

Around Christmas 2024, he was assigned to dispatch duty and sent up to the “tower.” The shifts were punishing—12 hours on, 12 hours off—and indeed, Mobley felt punished, he told his mom. Typically, dispatch shifts rotated among unit members, maybe up to six shifts a month, Standifer said. Mobley had been left on them full-time for three months.

Standifer said he witnessed Chapman, the master sergeant who was named 2024’s USMC Executive Fire Officer of the Year, berating and belittling Mobley on a regular basis. 

He’d get flak for attending medical appointments that took him away from work, Snell said. Toward the end, the abuse got worse, he said. “Basically, he was in Master Sgt. Chapman’s office, like, every day, just getting torn down, berated, basically getting told that he was garbage because he couldn’t work normally, like everybody else could,” Snell said. 

“You get injured. You can no longer do the job you’re passionate about. The people above you are now reminding you every single day that…you’re a piece of shit, and you know they don’t want you there.” 

Cole McEachern, another former ARFF member, was also on dispatch duty because of an injury, alternating 12-hour shifts with Mobley. “They treated our injuries like we chose to get them and treated dispatch as a punishment,” he said. 

“You’re a guy all alone, separated from your friends and family,” Standifer said. “Then you get injured. You can no longer do the job you’re passionate about. The people above you are now reminding you every single day that…you’re a piece of shit, and you know they don’t want you there.” 

“Why didn’t they just kick him out?” April asked. “Why keep doing that to him every day?”

The Mobleys, sister Emma, left, mom April, and dad Joseph, visited Drew in May 2022 when he was training at Marine Corps Air Station New River in North Carolina.Courtesy of April Mobley

‘Felt I Had Let Him Down’

Months before Mobley’s death, ARFF unit members filled out what’s known as a Defense Organizational Climate Survey. Congress mandated the annual surveys across the military to service members to provide what is supposed to be confidential feedback about their command. The War Horse submitted a Freedom of Information Act request on March 31 for ARFF’s surveys but is still waiting for a response. 

In the survey, Mobley explained how he felt he was being treated unfairly and that his shifts were isolating, according to a friend and fellow Marine who read over his submission. Mobley wanted “to ensure it would be taken seriously by the command,” the friend told The War Horse. He asked not to be identified because he is still serving in the Marines and feared retribution for speaking to a reporter. 

Marines who spoke to The War Horse said many of their concerns about leadership were glossed over. 

“We all felt completely unheard,” said the Marine who advised Mobley. When nothing changed, Mobley, in particular, took it hard. “I felt I had let him down by saying that the command would take everything seriously.”

Within a few months, Mobley was dead.

His death rattled his family. 

April Mobley wasn’t one to coddle her kids, she said. “I am the toughest mama that you can find.” But Drew was such a good boy, she said. An easy, likable kid. Always the first person to ask how you were doing, always the last person to complain about his own problems. The chaplain at Quantico told April that Drew would often stop by and ask how he was doing. Nobody else ever did that, the chaplain told April. (The chaplain didn’t respond to a LinkedIn message from The War Horse.)

“To see how they just pulled the life out of him, the happiness,” she said, her voice quaking. 

At Drew’s memorial, Gunnery Sgt. Brian Tabares approached April and told her they knew Drew was struggling, she said. “They knew,” April said. She was too grief-stricken to ask Tabares: Why didn’t anyone do anything to help him? 

“I just, I can’t understand that,” she said. 

Col. Scott Warman, center, commanding officer of Marine Corps Air Facility Quantico, handed over the non-commissioned officer sword to First Sgt. Christopher Rushton, during a relief and appointment ceremony in December 2024.Lance Cpl. Ethan Miller/U.S. Marine Corps

‘You Really Think ISIS Cares?’

Unprofessional. Lacking values. A disgrace to the uniform. 

These are among the insults Rushton and Warman hurled at ARFF just weeks after Mobley’s death. When the doors shut and the meeting started, Warman, a first-generation Marine with two combat deployments, made it clear not everyone was on notice.

Some of you will do “great things,” he told the group. “There’s a great deal of you who have such amazing future potential, not just in the Marine Corps, but in life.”

His focus quickly shifted.

“Some of you are selfish. You’re entitled. And you’re the most disloyal people I’ve ever met.”

After Mobley’s death, several Marines had specifically called out Chapman, the master sergeant. 

Chapman had a “tendency to pick certain individuals he deemed not to his liking,” Standifer wrote in the statement he provided to investigators and later shared with The War Horse. “No matter the skills or actual work the individual does, they will always be bottom-tier low-lives to MSgt[Master Sergeant].” Drew was one of these, Standifer wrote.

“Cpl. Mobley was verbally and publicly ridiculed for his inability to work shift due to a major leg injury,” Standifer wrote. This “caused him to get put in dispatch over and over, locked in a hole with only the occasional visits from shift members to keep him sane until he was pushed too far and ended his life.”

Another Marine was “constantly accused of using his mental health appointments to get out of work,” Standifer wrote. 

These statements were supposed to be kept confidential, Marines said—they were told they’d only be shared with Warman and other officers involved in the investigation. But now, here they were. Less than three weeks after Mobley’s suicide, Warman and Rushton were sitting in front of the entire unit, reading snippets from those same statements. 

Marines had complained about limited time with family. Some hadn’t seen their families in weeks, they said. In response, Rushton reprimanded them for not being team players. 

“You don’t want to switch shifts, because, ‘Oh, my wife’s schedule won’t allow it,’” he said. “Nobody gives a fuck about your wife’s schedule. Sorry if it hurts your feelings—maybe your feelings need to be hurt.”

Some Marines complained that leaders discouraged them from attending medical appointments—including mental health appointments—during work hours. Rushton insisted these appointments needed to happen on personal time. 

As for those who didn’t agree with him, Rushton said: “They’re being fucking lazy. …That’s you being fucking selfish.”

“How many of you’ve ever deployed to a combat zone?” Rushton asked. “Do you really think ISIS gives a fuck about your feelings?”

Rushton scolded the unit for blaming Mobley’s death on leadership. “Stop blaming the chain of command over your own personal problems.” 

One after another, he read aloud and rejected the criticism. 

“The work climate at ARFF, and I quote, ‘Will not improve if Mas. Ser. Chapman remains in charge. I respectfully and tactfully request a review of Mas. Ser. Chapman’s leadership and its effect on the unit.’”

Rushton was having none of it: “Know what that sounds like to me? There’s a naval term that that falls under. … What term am I referring to? Mutiny. It’s a fucking mutiny.”

‘Every Marine Feels Supported’

Capt. Michael P. Kennedy struck a different tone in the Marines’ official response to The War Horse about the unit’s claims and the closed-door meeting. 

“The loss of even one Marine to suicide is one too many,” he wrote in an email. “Our prevention and postvention efforts are applied with equal commitment and seriousness across Marine Corps Base Quantico. At Marine Corps Base Quantico, we are dedicated to fostering a community where every Marine feels supported and knows that help is always available.” 

But an examination of the Marines’ official suicide prevention procedures calls into question the response before and after Mobley’s death.  

The latest version of the document issued by the Commandant of the Marine Corps—coincidentally four days before Rushton and Warman’s meeting with ARFF—lays out procedures, from suicide prevention training requirements to dispelling the stigma of mental health care. “Command climate is a critical aspect of suicide prevention in the Marine Corps,” it reads. 

Leaders should be “involved with every aspect of Marines’ lives in the unit,” and they should “facilitate the discussion of life stressors between Marines and leadership without judgment or stigma.” It lays out potential warning signs that might urge a commander to order a mental health evaluation for a subordinate Marine, including “significant changes in performance” and “behavior changes that appear to be unmanageable by the Marine.” 

It also offers guidance for how to respond in the aftermath of a suicide. Those left behind might experience guilt, anger, shame, and betrayal after a suicide, it says. It’s common for those left behind to “seek answers and assign blame,” the document says. Leaders can help by “fostering hope” and avoiding framing that causes shame or guilt. Trust in leadership is key, the document instructs. “Ask other Marines how they are and actively listen.”

Leaders should “foster a positive, safe command climate that promotes healthy stress responses.” 

After a suicide, other Marines can be “at high risk.” These efforts help survivors cope with grief and prevent future suicides.

Warman addresses Marines before the Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighter Rodeo on Marine Corps Base Quantico in April 2024. Lance Cpl. Joaquin Dela Torre/U.S. Marine Corps Master Sgt. Jerry Chapman, center, was named the 2023 Military Chief Executive Fire Officer of the Year during the annual Marine Corps Fire & Emergency Services Awards Ceremony in June 2024.Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Pedro A. Rodriguez

Bracknell, the former Marine judge advocate who is now an adjunct professor at William & Mary Law School, said Rushton and Warman’s response to ARFF does not align with these guidelines. 

“First Sg. Rushton’s comments seeking to shift blame off the unit and pointing fingers at their ‘unprofessionalism’ in the wake of a suicide—that’s not the ‘positive, safe command climate’ the Commandant expected when he approved that guidance,” Bracknell said. “Instinctively, their reactions are the opposite of what any professional, caring, thoughtful, engaged leader would do in that instance.” 

Retired Marine Col. Don Wogaman, who was not involved in the investigation, appeared visibly troubled after he reviewed—at The War Horse’s request—how command leaders rebuked the Marines for raising concerns after Mobley’s suicide. 

The subject is painful for him—Wogaman remembers how a fellow Marine who served in the Gulf War took his own life while Wogaman was responding to his Facebook post. It “tears me up,” he said. He called Rushton and Warman’s response to the ARFF Marines “horrible leadership.”

In the Marines, Bracknell said, leaders often “fail to discern the difference between tough and cruel.” The skills hardened military commanders rely on to lead a unit are not the same ones needed to help them cope after a fellow service member’s suicide, he said. 

But at times during the closed-door meeting, Warman softened his tone, sharing lessons on leadership and living and dying as a team. 

At one point, he became contemplative over the suicides: “If anybody’s responsible, it’s me,” he told the Marines. “And I accept responsibility for that, because I’m the commander, and it’s happened under my watch. I own that, and those are the things I have to live with the rest of my life—that I had three, three Marines take their lives under my watch. 

“Never once in my 23-year career have I ever seen that. Ever.”

The Mobleys held Drew’s funeral on April 17, 2025, at Poston Baptist Church in his hometown of Wallace, North Carolina. Fellow Marine Michael Snell was one of the pallbearers. Courtesy of April Mobley

The Third Suicide

Mobley’s death was the third suicide in the Marine Corps Air Facility, or MCAF, in under two years. A senior enlisted Marine in the MCAF command died by suicide in August 2023, and an ARFF Marine took his own life about three months later. While The War Horse was reporting this story, another former ARFF member took his own life in February 2026.

The War Horse was unable to contact family connected to the most recent suicide, but did reach the spouses of the first two Marines who died. In a Facebook message, one of the women said her husband “never had any issues with higher-ups or colleagues” and that command leaders were there for her after his death, “especially MSGT Chapman,” the master sergeant whom Mobley’s unit members criticized.  

“It’s kind of like—you should get help, and then just know that your career might be over.” 

The other said in a phone interview that her husband had a largely positive experience in MCAF at Quantico. He suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, which stemmed from personal childhood trauma as well as his experiences in Fallujah. MCAF was one of the most supportive units he was in, his wife said. 

He took his own life a little over a week after receiving an official PTSD diagnosis, she said. 

“He knew that [seeking mental health treatment] would be career-changing,” she said. He reached out to a counselor during his time at MCAF, but the counselor told him she would have to notify his command if he came to her for help, which scared him off. 

Military culture dissuades people from seeking help, she said. “It’s kind of like—you should get help, and then just know that your career might be over.” 

The Suicide That Didn’t Happen

In the weeks around Mobley’s death, there was almost another suicide. 

Sgt. Cole McEachern’s story is similar to Mobley’s in many ways. During an aircraft emergency, he sustained a labral tear in his shoulder. Like Mobley, he was put on limited duty and 12-hour dispatch shifts. He and Mobley would alternate shifts, and sometimes spend extra time in the tower to keep each other company.

Unlike Mobley, McEachern wasn’t new to the military and had seen some violent things. On 12-hour dispatch shifts, he had “nothing but time” to think about these memories, he said. When he sought treatment for his nightmares and post-traumatic stress at the Quantico mental health clinic, he was told he had insomnia, and they couldn’t do anything for him, McEachern said. 

That’s when he started self-medicating with cocaine. 

The drugs fought off the nightmares. He’d stay awake for so long that when he crashed, his sleep was dreamless. 

Some days, McEachern would be driving to the ARFF station from the barracks, and he’d turn around, filled with dread at the thought of another day-long shift spent in solitude. Then, he said he’d think of Mobley—I can’t leave him there alone, he remembers thinking. He’d turn around again and make it to work, where he’d sit in his car, trying to psych himself up to go inside. 

Around shift changes, when both he and Mobley were present, he remembers that Chapman would regularly show up to chew them out. They were the “trouble kids” because they were injured, McEachern said. 

He talked to his dad Ryan McEachern on the phone nearly every day, and his father said he had noticed a shift in Cole’s demeanor. Cole was always frustrated, his father said, and he’d become more negative, more withdrawn. “When he would call, he just kind of had this depressed vibe about him,” Ryan McEachern said. He remembers one call where Cole said a member of leadership had told him he was “a piece of shit” and that “they didn’t really want [him] around anybody else” because he was a bad influence. Cole took a lot of pride in his work, Ryan McEachern said, so that hurt.

Ryan McEachern saw his son, Cole, graduate from boot camp in San Diego in 2019, 32 years after his own graduation there. Courtesy of Ryan McEachern Cole McEachern served in 2023 on Marine Wing Support Squadron 171 in Japan.Courtesy of Cole McEachern

“There’s just a meanness in people that do that, even in the Marine Corps,” said the father, also a Marine Corps veteran.

Around January 2025, Cole’s calls home became sparser, and Ryan McEachern could see on the “Find My Friends” app that Cole was keeping erratic hours, sometimes out as late as 4 a.m. 

Then on April 1, 2025, Ryan McEachern received a call he’ll never forget. 

“I fucked up, I’m a piece of shit, everyone’s going to f-ing hate me,” McEachern remembers his son saying. Cole confessed he’d done drugs the night before. “He spiraled into this, just, whole conversation about how horrible he was.” 

“I’m panicking,” Ryan McEachern said. “I was like, ‘Dude, where are you right this second?’” 

Cole told him he was on base in his truck. 

“I need you to drive to the mental health clinic,” Ryan McEachern told his son.

Cole resisted—the mental health clinic on base hadn’t been helpful in the past, so why would he go back there? 

“I said, ‘Do not hang up your phone,’” Ryan McEachern said, his voice shaking as he retold the story. He stayed on the phone as Cole walked into the clinic and approached the front desk. From the phone, Ryan shouted a message to the receptionist. “Before he can say a word, I’m like, ‘Don’t let this guy leave!’” 

As the clinic staff started to handle the situation, the gravity of what had almost happened hit hard. “I was like, holy shit,” Ryan McEachern said. “I think my kid was about to kill himself.” 

On April 11, Cole McEachern was eventually admitted into a month-long inpatient mental health program, just days after his friend Drew Mobley died. Cole missed the memorial service. 

Ryan McEachern said he wished Drew would have made a similar phone call. “I think about that constantly. That phone call sucked, but I was sure lucky to get it.” 

‘Feel Like I Owe Them’

Drew has been gone a year, but for April, the pain is still fresh. Her voice is still raw with anger and sadness. Sometimes, she trails off midsentence, choked by tears.  

Drew, who as a third grader, wanted everyone to “pray to God for the Marines that protected us and were willing to die,” is still with her. Once, after she visited Drew’s grave, she got in the car. The clock had changed to military time. “Never done that before,” she said. 

April stays in touch with other Marines. She feels responsible for them, she said. She calls them on holidays, invites them to her home for dinners, sends their kids Christmas and birthday presents. 

“Every boy that calls me, I feel like I owe it to them,” she said.

“I prayed to God. Like, what am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to have a purpose in all of this?” she implores. “What is my path?

“I truly feel like at this point, it’s to make all of these boys feel heard. To make them feel like what they went through was wrong and [for] somebody to acknowledge that.” 

On the first anniversary of Drew’s death, April took a trip to the Grand Canyon with her family. On the way there, they stopped at a convenience store. April wanted to buy a Coke, Drew’s favorite drink. She didn’t know why; she just felt like she needed to. At the rim of the canyon, as they took in the view, she placed the glass bottle down on a post. 

On the post, she spotted a sticker, left behind by another traveler. Its message astonished her: “Drew’s Crew.”

Click here to listen to a recording of the entire meeting at Marine Corps Base Quantico.

When the Mobleys got to the rim of the Grand Canyon a year after Drew’s death, they spotted this sticker on a post. Courtesy of April Mobley