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This story by Danielle M. Crosier was first published in the Bennington Banner on July 15, 2026.

DORSET — Charles “Max” Fish doesn’t think of history as something that lives only in textbooks or timelines. For him, it lives in the voices and the stories of everyday people — the way that someone pauses before naming a place, or the way a memory changes with perspective, maturity, knowledge and time, and with the telling.

Over the last year, the Dorset-based independent historian has been collecting those voices from Vermont veterans, recording their experiences for the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. Over the past year, his work has taken him across Southern Vermont — from American Legion halls to farm kitchens — sitting with men who went to war and then came home to towns that had mostly moved on.

What Fish is trying to save isn’t just military history. It’s a way of understanding the past through another’s lived experience, and he worries that that particular form of history is quietly disappearing from the record.

“If we don’t write it down, it disappears,” he said. “A lot of these stories only exist in one person’s memory. Once they’re gone, we’ve lost a whole way of seeing who we were.”

A life of listening

Fish’s commitment to storytelling began long before this particular and current project. As a high school sophomore, he called historical societies and a VA hospital until he found a World War II veteran willing to talk — an Army aviator named Thomas O’Rourke, who had served in the Pacific.

The resulting hourlong interview, cut to 45 minutes and paired with wartime images, became a school project. Sadly, O’Rourke died less than two years later.

“I realized that what I had from him, especially because it was so short before he died, was something really valuable,” Fish said. “It was a piece of history that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.”

Later, as a history major at Tulane University, Fish worked with a New Orleans queer archive, digitizing photographs, letters and ephemera from LGBTQ+ communities whose lives often went undocumented. “It was community preserved through history,” he said. “People who might feel isolated could see that people like them had always been there.”

Those experiences have shaped how he now thinks about archives: not as neutral repositories, but as living records that can either include or erase whole groups of people, depending on who gets asked and who gets heard.

Turning toward Vermont’s veterans

Fish discovered the Veterans History Project through National Public Radio’s StoryCorps, listening with his parents in the car. Founded in 2000, the project gathers oral histories, letters, photographs and other materials from U.S. veterans and their families.

When he moved back to Vermont and wanted to return to historical work after a stretch in retail, Fish saw an opening.

He contacted the Dorset Historical Society, where he had previously volunteered as a docent and digitized archivist, and began working independently to contribute Vermont veteran interviews to the Library of Congress collection.

Over the following roughly six to seven months — late summer and fall of 2025 into 2026 — he drove around southern and central Vermont, reaching out to historical societies and American Legion posts and asking, in essence, the same question, “Would you be willing to tell me your story?”

“At first, it was just handshakes at Legion dinners,” he said. “Once one person agreed, they’d say, ‘You should talk to my buddy,’ and it grew from there.”

Now, those interviews span Korean War service, Vietnam tours on the ground and at sea, and peacetime Cold War deployments. And, according to Fish, some of the men have never described their experiences in such detail, even to their families.

What gets lost when a story isn’t told

Fish is quick to say he’s not interested in definitive conclusions. For him, the power is in particularity — the concrete detail that never makes it into formal histories.

He talks about a submariner, Buzz Fisher, who earned his “dolphins,” the qualification pin for submariners, by learning every system on his boat. “He knew every inch of that submarine,” Fish said. “That pride, that sense of mastery — it’s a part of history you can’t see in a list of ship deployments.”

Another interview subject, Dorset’s Dave Yandell, who served on the aircraft carrier USS Ranger during Vietnam, told Fish that no one had ever simply asked him to tell his story from his own perspective, “(For him,) everyone wanted something very specific confirmed or debunked,” Fish said. “No one said, ‘What did it feel like? What did it mean to you?’”

When Fish did, Yandell described seeing the USS Ranger for the first time and then the last, tearing up and overcome with emotion at the retelling. It is those moments, Fish argues, that complicate the flat, heroic or purely critical versions of military history that can often dominate public debates.

“Official records can tell you where a unit was and when,” he said, referencing the young men who worshiped the veterans of World War II and Korea only to find themselves ostracized following service in Vietnam. “They can’t tell you what it did to someone to come home and feel like they couldn’t talk about it for 50 years.”

He worries that, without sustained efforts to collect such stories, a whole layer of historical understanding will vanish — not just facts about battles, but how those battles reshaped the people who fought them, and the communities and families that they returned to.

Barriers to an accurate historical record

Despite the importance of these accounts, Fish has found that getting them formally archived is not a simple undertaking. It is complicated. It is messy. And the subjects are often deeply unwilling.

The Veterans History Project requires veterans to sign consent forms that transfer ownership of their recorded interviews and of any donated materials to the Library of Congress. For some Vermonters, that step has been too difficult.

“Some of the men were comfortable talking to me, but not comfortable signing a document that said their story now belongs to a federal institution,” Fish said. “They’d already given up a lot of control once in their lives.”

Others hesitate for different reasons

Several Vietnam veterans whom Fish spoke with wrestle with guilt and unresolved questions about their own survival and their service — feelings that they may be willing to voice in conversation, but not ready to see published with their names forever attached.

Fish described a conscientious objector who served as a medic in Vietnam, risking his life repeatedly without carrying a weapon. In one ambush, pressured by the chaos around him, he set aside his medical kit to haul ammunition for a machine gunner — an act that technically violated the terms of his conscientious objector status.

“Everyone in his unit saw what happened and understood why,” Fish said. “But from his perspective, putting that on the record is complicated. It’s not just about policy, it’s about how he sees himself.”

Additionally, there are even more deeply rooted concerns about reprisals and judgments that could come in the wake of exposure — and fear of appearing critical or disloyal to those who served alongside them, to the chain of command under which they served, to the mission that they believed themselves to be fighting for, or to the decision-makers in the federal government. It’s almost like a collective case of Stockholm syndrome.

“You hear, you know, like ‘no man left behind,’ but that’s only true when you can afford it to be. And, I think what I hope people take away is that men like (those interviewed) are just average everyday Americans in impossible situations. You hear about stories like ‘Hacksaw Ridge’ and ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and you think, ‘That’s got to be Hollywood’ until you meet men that have actually walked and lived those stories,” Fish said. “I hope that … it just becomes a little more real to people.”

“And again, we as Americans have been so disconnected from war for so long (even though) our Army’s been fighting in every single war all over the place, but not (on the home front)”, Fish said.

A loyalty that can often complicate the truth of a lived experience

One of the most striking patterns in Fish’s interviews is the tension that he has found veterans feel between loyalty to the military and honesty about the feelings of what they lived through.

Around the stories of battles and bases, he hears a quieter struggle — a struggle of men who still love the institution that shaped them, yet carry deep doubts about the wars that they were sent to fight.

Every veteran he spoke with remembered training with true and deep affection — the sense of purpose, the discipline, the friendships that formed under pressure.

“Whether you come in because you’ve got nothing better to do, or because you’ve always wanted to be there, you come out part of something bigger than yourself,” Fish said. “Every single person I talked to really values that feeling.”

But he also found a sharp divide between those who served at a distance and those who were face to face with combat. Sailors on aircraft carriers recalled celebrating after dropping their “millionth ton” of TNT. Infantrymen in the jungle, by contrast, emerged with what Fish describes as a kind of permanent disillusionment.

“The men who were right on the front lines often had a very different takeaway,” he said. “They realized that all of the lies that had been told to them up until that point were just that: lies. It becomes this desperate, chaotic scramble to survive.”

Many of those front-line veterans, especially from Vietnam, told Fish privately that they felt the war should never have been fought, or that it was abandoned in a way that betrayed both allies and the American dead.

Yet, despite their convictions, when it came time to sign the Library of Congress paperwork, they pulled back. They worried that speaking plainly would “do a disservice to the institution,” as one man put it, or undermine the pride and identity that service had given them and given to others, including those who serve today.

In short, it was a brotherhood, and one that they could not betray. And, for Fish, that reluctance is itself a crucial part of the story.

“These are men who still feel bound to the people they served with and to the uniform they wore,” he said. “They’re proud of the training and the camaraderie, even as they question the reasons they were sent. That makes it incredibly hard to put their full truth on the permanent record – but it’s exactly why those stories matter.”

Stories as a safeguard and on the record

Fish has completed and submitted several interviews to the Library of Congress, with more in the editing queue as he prepares to leave for Austria to pursue graduate study. But he’s also keenly aware that many of the stories he’s heard will likely remain off the official books, preserved only in his notes and in his memory.

“Even when the paperwork doesn’t get signed, the conversations still matter,” he said. “They’re a reminder of how much history never makes it into the archive at all.”

Underneath the practical information about the Veterans History Project and how people can participate is a quieter argument: that listening to individual stories is not a sentimental exercise but a form of civic responsibility.

“We’re in a country where most of us are several steps removed from war,” he said. “If we only understand it through movies, speeches, textbooks or policy debates, we’re missing something essential.”

Fish believes that hearing veterans describe, in their own words, what they saw and how it changed them offers a check against abstraction — the kind that can make it easier to accept future conflicts without fully grasping their human cost.

At the same time, he resists framing veterans solely as symbols or lessons. “These are ordinary people in impossible situations,” he said. “Their stories are a part of our history, whether we record them or not. The question is whether we’re willing to listen in time.”

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