It's a truism: If American men and women are old enough to fight for their country, they're old enough to drink.

No argument. The subject came up this month with the disclosure that the Marine Corps is lowering the drinking age of its stalwarts to 18, on base and in certain situations. Why not? A man can't sensibly be half a Marine, a boy in some instances and a man in others, no matter what loving parents, wives and friends like to say. We all do: "He's still a kid."

Yet that is the predicament that the United States has so often found itself in. Hoping for the best when it has sent its boys to war, and getting men back who haven't a single mark of their boyhood left.

There is a path through this odd but fundamental predicament, and it is this: Forget about lowering drinking ages or even paying much attention to them. Instead, raise the fighting age.

Permit no man or woman to get into battle who is under the age of 25.

Until about the age of 22, most male humans are still boys. (Most female persons have become women by then.) They may have the hand-eye coordination requisite for part of the work a combatant does, but in most cases - not all - they are not up to other parts of the job.

In the war in Iraq, we have seen too many instances of young soldiers and Marines forced to make decisions of uncommon complexity, often involving death, and have seen, too, that they were not ready for that, and awful things resulted.

Most of the young men there to "fight for freedom" have no concept of such lofty thinking; they're trying to stay alive and to do what they can to watch their buddy's back. Even if they have glimmers of the mission or cause, they are quite often not yet equipped - because of youth and inexperience - to apply it, to work within its parameters, to think in abstract terms.

Not when roaring madness is everywhere. They are not, in a word, seasoned.

Raising the age of going to war to 25 seems rational and humane. Such fighters would have infinitely more training because there was time for it. They'd have tasted a good deal more of life and had time and opportunity to rid their systems of some of the crazed behavior that is called youth. Their decisions would probably be sounder, saner, safer than those of kids of 18 and 19.

Not always, of course. You just can't generalize when it comes to boys and men. Some males have shown themselves in Iraq to be combat veterans while still in their teens. They have come up wise and calm, just as a 25-year-old might. They have displayed leadership qualities of older comrades, and bless them all.

But older warriors will have had a chance to grow up, to mature, to think a bit more and more deeply. This is not to say that things in Iraq would be better if the minimum age of combat were set at 25. Nobody can know that. Maybe the number of casualties over there would still be in the 3,000-plus range, and maybe not.

But there is a golden chance that certified men would understand better what they were setting out to do than boys would. But there'd be no guarantees.

Somehow there is something cleaner, something far more decent in sending men to do men's awful work than dispatching kids to try to figure out in hysteria and fear why they have to draw so close to death to get a first glimpse of the fleeting wonder of life.

A poem by Siegfried Sassoon, written in the trenches of World War I, seems to apply.

"I knew a simple soldier boy/Who grinned at life in empty joy,/Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,/And whistled early with the lark."

"In winter trenches, cowed and glum,/With crumps and lice and lack of rum,/He put a bullet through his brain./No one spoke of him again.

"You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye/Who cheer when soldier lads march by,/Sneak home and pray you'll never know/The hell where youth and laughter go."

The truth is that sending anybody to war is atrocious.

Sending boys must surely be criminal.

- Contact columnist John Van Doorn at (760)739-6647 or jvandoorn@nctimes.com.