One thing that has never made sense to me is that we will willingly send 18-year-olds to war, but won’t let them order a beer. 

If 18 isn’t old enough to drink, it’s certainly not old enough to go to war. 

The way I see it, you’re practically still a kid when you’re 18. 18-year-olds are adolescents. Many of them are fresh out of high school if not still in high school. They have no place in the military, much less a war zone. 

Sure, you may say “well they’re legal adults” or “tons of 18-year-olds gladly sign up for the military,” but that’s not the point. I don’t care whether or not they are “technically an adult.” I also don’t care if they willingly enlisted in the military or were made to register for the draft.

At the end of the day, they’re still teenagers. Developmentally, they’re still trying to understand and navigate the world. They’re still learning how to make informed decisions on their own and understand the repercussions of those decisions. Not only are they freshly graduated, but many of them haven’t lived outside their parents house and don’t have the experience of largely being on their own. 

Being a “legal adult” at 18 is purely a legal technicality. Regardless, they’ll let you enlist at 17 with parental consent.

When it comes to the possibility of sending them to fight in a war, I don’t think we can have the same mentality we do when we’re talking about voting or opening a checking account. 

How can we be okay with sending someone who, in my opinion, is essentially still a child to war knowing that there’s a grave possibility they might never come back home? Or, that if they do come back home, they’ll bring a lifetime of trauma with them that is sure to stay in their lives longer than the time they lived without it? 

Even if only around 10 percent of U.S. service members actually engage in combat, 60 percent see combat during their time in service. Even just witnessing combat can be damaging, especially for adolescent “adult” teenagers. This isn’t even mentioning the fact that our country does the bare minimum for veterans, especially those who’ve engaged in active warfare.

This may not sit well with everyone, and I’m not expecting it to. Maybe I only feel this way because I feel that it’s completely irrational to have such an age gap in the drinking age and voluntary service age—and that’s not to say I’m an advocate for raising the drinking age. Maybe I only feel this way because I’m disgusted by the concept of war and what it does to people. But regardless, I don’t think we should send kids as young as 18 to war with the thought of death looming over their head. 

They’re still kids, and we shouldn’t be sending kids to combat.