When Dane Partridge told his mother that he felt he needed to go to Ukraine, Terri Hepworth told him what she feared most.
“If you go, you’re not coming back,” she remembers saying.
Partridge, a U.S. Army veteran and father of five children who had previously served in Iraq, traveled to Ukraine in April 2022, weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion. He joined a unit with other foreign volunteers and returned to combat as a volunteer soldier.
On Oct. 3, 2022 Partridge was critically wounded during a Russian attack near Sievierodonetsk in eastern Ukraine. He suffered severe injuries to his neck and brain stem and was evacuated to a hospital in Zaporizhzhia, where he remained on life support.
He died on Oct. 11, 2022. He was 34.
Four years later, his mother is continuing what she sees as her son’s mission — advocating for continued U.S. support for Ukraine.
“I can’t crawl in the trenches. I can’t do those things,” Hepworth told Independence Avenue Media. “But I can talk and I can speak to representatives, and I can hopefully help them hear and see the need that Ukraine has.”
Hepworth returned to Washington in September to participate for the third time in the Ukraine Action Summit, organized by the American Coalition for Ukraine. Held twice a year, the summit brings advocates from across the United States to Washington to meet with lawmakers and their staff and advocate for continued U.S. support for Ukraine.
This September, more than 650 participants from all 50 states and Puerto Rico took part in 459 congressional meetings.
For Hepworth, the advocacy is inseparable from the decision Partridge made in 2022.
‘I Feel Like I’m Sending You to Your Death’
Partridge was the youngest of five siblings. Born in Germany, he grew up in a military family. His father served in the U.S. Air Force, and the family moved every few years to different bases in the United States and Germany before Partridge eventually moved to Idaho with his mother and siblings.
He joined the U.S. Army, where he served in Iraq. He left the Army in 2012, working as a long-haul trucker and tow-truck driver.
Years later, another war drew him back to the battlefield.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Hepworth says her son wrestled with the idea of going. He had a family, and the decision was not easy.
“But he felt this urge that he had to go,” she says.
One day, he told her: “I feel like I need to go to Ukraine.”
Hepworth struggled with what supporting that decision would mean.
“If I don’t support you, you go not knowing how much I love you,” she told him. “But if I support you, I feel like I’m sending you to your death.”
They sat together for a while.
Then, Hepworth says, she heard a voice telling her: “Let him go.”
“So I said, ‘Dane, I support you.’”
She says what happened afterward changed the way she understood his decision.
“I watched him become the man he always wanted to be,” she says. “He had purpose. He wasn’t a lost soul trying to find out his way after war.”
“He did it in Ukraine. It was like, this is what he was meant to do,” she adds.
The Last Video Call
Partridge left Idaho, raised money and gathered the equipment he needed for Ukraine. His mother accompanied him to the airport in Salt Lake City.
It would be the last time she saw him in person.
Four days before his final battle, he unexpectedly called her.
“He did a video call, which he had never done,” Hepworth remembers.
He was driving a pickup truck to collect two members of his team who were sick.
What stayed with his mother was his expression.
“I noticed his face. I noticed his smile,” she says. “He was happy. He was happy.”
Hepworth says she does not believe her son could have made a different choice.
“My son was born with a warrior’s heart,” she says.
She remembers him as someone who had always defended others, even as a child.
“He was always sticking up for the underdog, and if he felt that the teacher was wrong, he spoke up,” she says. “It got him in trouble, but he was always ready to help someone.”
In Ukraine, she says, he found the purpose he had been looking for.
“His last days I saw him happy serving people that he learned to love very quickly and that loved him back.”
Following Her Son to Ukraine
After Partridge’s death, Hepworth traveled to Ukraine with the help of To Ukraine With Love, an organization that raises money to rebuild homes and assist people affected by the war.
They Lost Their Homes to Russia. An American Built Them a New Village
For Hepworth, simply arriving in the country carried enormous meaning.
“It was so good to be on soil that my son’s last place was,” she says.
She met Ukrainian soldiers.
“I was able to hug soldiers,” Hepworth says. “Now, every soldier I see is now my boy.”
She thanked them for allowing Partridge to fight alongside them.
The trip also took her farther east, where she saw destroyed homes and schools and heard firsthand accounts from people who had experienced attacks and occupation.Hepworth remembers seeing heavily damaged residential buildings and hearing stories from families forced from their homes.
“Why a hospital? Why children? Why families?” she asks. “It’s wrong. It’s awful.”
For Hepworth, the experience reinforced her conviction that Americans need to understand what is happening in Ukraine beyond what they see from afar.
“I want people to know that the news isn’t quite accurate,” she says. “That you have a real need. And it behooves us to support you.”
‘This is My Way’
Hepworth spends her visits to Washington going from congressional office to congressional office, sharing what she has seen and what happened to her son.
She acknowledges the concerns of Americans who question how much more the United States should provide for Ukraine.
“I can see where they’re coming from,” she says. “We have our own troubles.”
She says she worries about U.S. weapons stocks herself.
But she asks Americans to imagine what they would want if their own families were facing what Ukrainian families face.
“What would you do if it was your child that was taken away?” she asks. “Where would you turn for help if we made a promise long ago? Should we not find a way to honor that?”
She also draws a parallel with America’s experience before World War II.
“We were isolationists in World War II,” Hepworth says. “It wasn’t long before we were drug in that war.”
“Let’s stop it here and now in Ukraine. Or it will be our problem on our land.”
Hepworth says most of the congressional offices she visited were already supportive of Ukraine. But she believes showing up can reinforce that support.
“If I can make their stance stronger, it’s important to make that stronger,” she says.
She hopes the message will reach President Donald Trump.
“We need to act quickly,” Hepworth says. “There’s so much that can be done if they will just listen and see what’s really going on in Ukraine.”
An American Who Came Home ‘by Cargo’
For Hepworth, there is another reason to keep telling her son’s story.
She does not believe Americans fully understand what U.S. volunteers who fought and died in Ukraine chose to do.
“He wasn’t sent there by our military, but he was an American,” Hepworth says. “And he did what was right.”
She remembers his return to the United States in stark terms.
“Mine came home by cargo,” she says.
Hepworth says Ukraine has honored the Americans who volunteered and died there and shown gratitude to their families. In the United States, she says, those families can sometimes feel isolated.
“We’re mothers and fathers around the United States, and we’re in our own little pockets,” she says. “And we feel alone.”
Asked whether walking from office to office on Capitol Hill feels like continuing Partridge’s mission, she does not hesitate.
“Yes.”
She cannot fight in the trenches.
“But I can talk and this is my way,” she says.
