Soon, the United States may launch a war on Iraq.

When it does, the combat veterans will return home to a hero’s welcome, and deservedly so.

But many of them won’t be able to celebrate with a drink at a bar because the legal drinking age from Anchorage to St. Augustine is 21. And that is because the states were forced to lift the drinking age, or lose federal highway funds.

At 18, our sons are old enough to die on a dirt road outside Baghdad, but not old enough to buy a cold beer in Baltimore.

If this seems an odd subject for a column, it is, and in due course, you will know what inspired it.

But first, the genesis of the bad law:

Following that doomed and disastrous experiment in federal nannyism called prohibition, many states adopted 21 as their drinking age, with some permitting only beer at 18. When the age of adulthood began dropping to 18, and then the age to vote dropped, the thinking was that young men old enough to vote and die in wars were old enough to imbibe alcohol. Between 1970 and 1975, 30 states lowered drinking ages.

Then came the campaign against drunk driving, a noble cause without doubt. Its goal: raise the drinking age to 21. By lifting the legal age everywhere to 21, the thought was, fewer young people would drink and die, or kill others, in senseless crashes. Some say it has worked; others say it hasn’t.

Regardless, in 1984, Congress passed a law to withhold highway pork bound for the states if they did not comply with the new dogma on the correct age to drink. It was an end-run around the Constitution, which says the states should regulate alcohol.

Now, you must be 21 to buy a drink in the United States. No politician, after all, would be stupid enough to refuse pork and concomitantly thumb his nose at the movement against blotto driving.

Which means what? The answer inspired this column.

Recently, “To Hell and Back,” the story of Audie Murphy, America’s most decorated combat hero, appeared on television. As Murphy received his Medal of Honor, the crowning achievement to 32 other combat decorations, I observed aloud that he would not be allowed to buy a drink. He was barely 20 by the time he killed some 250 of Hitler’s finest in battle, and held off a German attack by calling down artillery fire on his own position, the heroic deed that earned him our nation’s highest battle decoration.

Yet some federal bureaucrat would have the nerve to say, “sorry Audie, you can’t have a beer; you’re not old enough.”

The more subtle irony is this: The government will pin medals on an 18-year-old who kills a dozen Iraqis. But it will throw him in jail for drinking a Budweiser.

Undoubtedly some will ask about the laws 60 years ago. Could Murphy have ordered a drink back then? Most likely, yeah; a bartender would have ignored the law. The government had not yet cowed Americans into abject submission.

Soon, this nation may send its sons, many of them under 21, to fight and possibly die in war.

They deserve at least a beer when they leave, and those who return will have earned a stiff shot of whiskey.

R. Cort Kirkwood is managing editor of the Daily News-Record in Harrisonburg, Va. His e-mail address is: kirkwood@shentel.net.