I WAS riding the Metro to the airport in Washington the other day, and one of the stops along the way was going to be the Pentagon. I noticed that a number of my fellow passengers were in uniform, including a soldier standing near me. He was wearing the Army combat uniform, the distinctively patterned green, tan, and gray camouflage. His trousers were bloused above his boots, and the jacket was marked with shoulder patches and name tape.
But what struck me most was his large backpack, also camouflaged and field-ready. From the way he titled toward his hand-hold, I sensed the weight of the load. It was impossible not to think of the television news footage of similarly outfitted troopers kicking through doors in Iraq or dodging bullets in Afghanistan.
When the soldier got off at the Pentagon stop, it was with a hitch, adjusting the weight. I wondered about his duties. The backpack suggested ammunition, tenting, rations - gear. But he was headed to a mere office building, where gear consists of briefing books, accordion folders, and laptops. The soldier was wearing a patrol cap, not a helmet, so it wasn’t really that he seemed headed off to battle. But then it struck me that, however anomalous the backpack seemed in the urban subway car, a soldier decked out in his combat uniform would have looked silly carrying an attaché case. That, after all, is an item of diplomacy, not combat.
I’ve been thinking about that soldier’s backpack ever since. Tim O’Brien’s masterpiece, “The Things They Carried,’’ comes to mind, but Vietnam isn’t the point. As is true of many things (safety razor, wrist watch, short haircuts), the canvas bag with shoulder straps came into common use with World War I (“Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag.’’).
By now every schoolchild has a backpack, and playgrounds are mounded with them - the most banal of objects. But the backpack in World War I defined the absurdity of the conflict, and its horror. Millions of men went “over the top’’ out of trenches, to dash across No Man’s Land. Almost every one of them carried the 60-pound load of gear that would be useful only if the enemy lines were breached, which they almost never were.
The packs slowed the soldiers down, inhibited their agility, and made them juicy targets. Western Front machine guns almost never faltered, and the offensive charge was almost always futile, making the back-burden nothing less than an additional enemy. But regulations required it, and the high command never saw fit to alter them - even for those who went first. It is reasonable to assume that most of the millions who died in the trench warfare were weighed down by packs that were beyond useless.
“The backpack thus became a symbol,’’ in the words of historian Modris Eksteins, “of the social and cultural baggage each soldier carried with him into battle.’’ What baggage weighs down the troopers of today? Obviously, a blind foolishness of the high command is still at work, as one set of false assumptions about the two American wars has repeatedly given way to the next.
The only consistency in the US war effort across eight years has been confusion about who the enemy is - from Al Qaeda to Taliban to “terrorists’’ to Ba’athists to Shi’ites to Sunnis to “insurgents’’ to Taliban again to - what next? Pashtuns? Elements of the Pakistani security service? The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts may seem to have little in common with World War I, but they are all three alike in showing how war, even as it proves to be pointless, can also prove to be unstoppable.
US troop levels in Afghanistan are going up, along with measures of confusion about whom our forces are actually at war with. One could say that, having been handed the brush by his predecessor, President Obama is going a step further by painting himself into a corner - but actually it is our brave soldiers who are cornered, and the relevant fluid is blood, not paint. Their backpacks are weighed down by, in addition to gear, the stubborn mistakes of those in command.
The heaviest load now is the question: How long, Mister President?
James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe. 
