Nicole Michell Phipps, a soft-spoken 21-year-old woman in a furry hood who showed up at the Navy recruitment center in Harlem on Tuesday, said she was drawn to the military in search of more "structure" in her life.
She was hesitating about signing up for the military because she knew she could be risking her life. At 18, she said, she had not been ready for such a choice.
"I would say, yeah, 18, you just come out of high school," Ms. Phipps said. "You're really not sure what to do. I would say 21 is probably the best."
The same went for smoking, she said. Voting? "I think 18 is good for that," she said. "It's not causing harm to your body."
When New York City officials proposed on Monday to raise the minimum age to legally buy tobacco in the city to 21 from 18 — which would make it the highest of any major city in the United States — people across the country, commenting on news Web sites, were outraged by a seeming inconsistency. Updating a well-traveled argument about minimum drinking ages, they considered it ludicrous that 18-year-olds would be able to fight in wars but not buy cigarettes.
As it turned out, many of the young people walking into the military recruitment center on 125th Street the next day also saw the inconsistency. In general, they thought that it was true that they were not mature enough to make life-or-death decisions on their own before 21. That applied not only to smoking and drinking, but also to combat.
They saw a dangerous world out there, and they wanted to be protected from it as long as they could be.
If it were up to them, they said, no one could fight in a war until 21. And if the city wanted to act in loco parentis on something as bad as smoking, well then, that seemed right to them, too.
Patrick Brown, a lanky 21-year-old with braces on his teeth, said that just three years ago, he would never have enlisted on his own. It would have to be "50-50" with his mother, and even now, he said, he had consulted her, and felt better knowing that "she was O.K. with it."
Eighteen, Mr. Brown said, is too young to fight and die for your country.
Is it too young to smoke? "If the parent condones it, then I guess it's acceptable," Mr. Brown, a nonsmoker, said.
Ms. Phipps said she had once tried cigarettes but did not like them. Every decision is like a life lesson, Ms. Phipps said. "At 18, you are supposed to make bad decisions."
Brain experts say that Ms. Phipps is right, that the teenage brain is different.
"The executive function, the portion of the brain which is capable of making certain types of decisions, is really not fully developed until actually over 21," said Cheryl G. Healton, dean of Global Public Health at New York University, and a supporter of the higher age minimum.
Older adults with the benefit of a lot of hindsight might tend to agree. But a few veterans interviewed Tuesday saw the city's proposal as patronizing.
Raul Gonzalez, 34, of the Bronx, a corporal in the Persian Gulf War, smokes a pack of cigarettes a day as a way to take his mind off back pain from years of lifting heavy artillery.
"If you're old enough to serve your country, then you're old enough to make your own decisions on what you do to your body," he said while outside a Veterans Affairs center in Lower Manhattan.
But a few moments later, he began to rethink his position. "It could help a lot of people out," noting that a week ago he buried his 60-year-old father, a heavy smoker who died from throat cancer. But Mr. Gonzalez added that for anyone under 21 who is serving in the military, "there should be exceptions" to the law.
At the Harlem recruitment center, Dana Farmer Jr., 24, said he thought that 18-year-olds were not mature enough to make decisions about war or smoking, but also that raising the age to buy cigarettes would not stop them from smoking if they wanted to.
He said he hoped to play tenor sax in the Navy band as a strategy to avoid being shot at in Afghanistan. He was considering signing up so he could pay off his college loans faster than if he continued to work for low wages at Duane Reade, but he knew he was potentially endangering his life. "You've got to take the good with the bad," he said.
At 18, was he mature enough to figure that out? He answered instantly: "No, no, no."
Meredith Mandell contributed reporting.
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