I’m one of three newer members of the Hartford selectboard. I’m going to explain why I probably won’t vote against posting a dozen or more banners featuring veterans on poles in downtown White River Junction for six months out of the year.

It’s my first elected position after a lifetime of following politicians, and holding them accountable, through writing. Mostly getting paid with just “sandwich money,” as my girlfriend likes to say. While I probably* didn’t risk my life for a cause, the pay wasn’t much different from that given to members of our armed services right now. They’re getting so little, especially considering they put their lives on the line.

And we never have paid them much. My best friend from high school was deployed to Iraq. He and I were the only protesters at the George W. Bush rally in Chillicothe, Ohio. (Technically we were protesting the Patriot Act, which eroded civil liberties.) My buddy came back a changed man. I think that, like my uncle who came back from Vietnam, my friend would say it wasn’t worth the money. It was, however, worth learning how devoted you can be to a cause, and how deeply you’re able to bond with fellow humans.

It must, and should, be said that these things can be had outside the military. Those two veterans and I have shared a viewpoint: Support all veterans. Oppose all wars.

Opposing all wars necessarily means opposing the bureaucratic, and wildly profitable, human machine that nudges us into those wars. (It must be said that some part of that “machine” is public messaging in small towns like ours.) In a post a couple weeks back to social media and my personal website, I quoted Dwight Eisenhower on how “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.”

Other wealthy countries have tax rates around 40%. With these taxes, they provide education, healthcare, child care. In the U.S., we pay for most of these services privately, out of our own pockets. Though we aren’t being taxed by the government for them, we are still paying for them. Some studies show that these services combined now cost average American families around 70% of our paychecks. So much for “low taxes.”

Instead, much of our tax money goes to the military. Around 50% of U.S. federal tax revenues—this year and every—go toward warmaking. Possibly more. (Receipts provided at the post on my website.) Many well-reported articles, including a bombshell in Rolling Stone in 2019, show what audits show: record-keeping at DOD is a farce. They can, and likely do, spend whatever they want. As Eisenhower said, each of those dollars is just wasted effort that can no longer be put to use for us.

The value we get out of the war machine isn’t what you might think. China, the next-largest spender, pays for one tenth what we do. Even if we spent only what China spends, we’d almost certainly face no challengers, given our network of allies. For its part, China hasn’t bombed anyone in 80 years. In that time, we’ve bombed 28 countries. If you’re curious about the devastation we’ve wrought, read “The Jakarta Method.”

Perhaps you think the question is only whether I support veterans, not whether anyone supports or opposes warmaking generally. And yet. Huge swaths of veterans say that to support service members and veterans, you *must* oppose all wars.

I say let’s not “support” veterans in the half-measure way we support pregnant women: all our effort going into persuasive efforts, into message-making, and comparatively little effort going into caring for women or their babies. This is how I see these banners: all smoke and no fire. I would much rather we offer better services to veterans, and better opportunities to connect in the community.

A couple weeks back, when I voiced my opposition, I sent a letter to the group that proposed the banners. Rather than six months, I recommended, perhaps we fly them a few days around each of the two veteran-focused holidays. I also stated a couple other conditions for my full-throated support: a design review by some panel of long-time downtown stakeholders; and the ability for an anti-war veterans group, Veterans For Peace, to design about 1/5 of the total banners. I didn’t receive a response from the group.

Perhaps the free speech I’m using to say these things was won for me by service members. But not *necessarily* so. It’s not self evident. Lots of countries have free speech beyond ours (as rated by organizations who study this kind of thing), and they’ve had wildly varied military histories. Several of them have no militaries at all. Others had ground invasions, defended themselves, and then disbanded most of their military, as George Washington had hoped we would do here.

When it comes to brass tacks, how I vote will have more of a personal motivation. It’s about my conscience. If there’s any chance that even one more kid could sign up due to how I vote, then I must decline. And you can’t deny there’s a chance.

As I said, I’m new to official public service. I don’t represent the board; I represent myself. I’m trying to remain true to myself. (Would you have me be any other way?) For what it’s worth, I do represent a contingent of Hartford residents who share my beliefs. About half the letters I received in response thanked me. The letters were nice. None had a hint of disrespecting veterans. On the contrary: we’re doing what we think will help create fewer veterans. That’s something my vet friends can get behind.

Epilogue: A lot of mass media in recent years has been happy to point out how we’re all so very different. As a former investigative reporter, I can’t help but ask: who benefits from that? From us being so quick to dismiss one another; to assume things about one another? I know one thing: if we were united against military spending, then they couldn’t spend what they do. And we will never be united against military spending if we can’t talk openly and honestly about how to do precisely this: show vets we respect their personal sacrifices without any promotion of America’s way of war.

Brandon Smith is a member of the Hartford Selectboard but writes as a private citizen. His writing has been published in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, The Daily Beast, and Chicago Reader. Smith has won an investigative reporting award from the Associated Press, and was the youngest-ever winner of the I.F. Stone award, the only U.S. award for independent journalism. He now works for a house builder in the Upper Valley.