Wes Moore tried to run away from military school. It changed his life instead.

At midnight, two hours after the mournful sound of taps signaled the end of another grueling day at Valley Forge Military Academy, Wes Moore climbed out of his metal bunk bed, slung a packed bag over his shoulder and crept out of Wheeler Hall. He passed the academy’s elegant old brick buildings and headed toward a thicket of woods — the threshold to freedom, he thought. Yet as he walked deeper into the buffer of trees that separated the campus from the affluent residential neighborhoods of Wayne, Pa., he realized the directions he held in his hand that night in 1991 were useless; he was lost.