Pack

Before the barbell, before the market weight, before anyone thought of strength as a thing to be built on purpose, human beings trained for it in the only way the world offered: they picked something heavy up and carried it a long way, because there was no other way to get it there. Water, wood, children, game, the whole household on a move. The load on the back is the oldest strength practice there is, older than any tool, and for most of history it was not a practice at all. It was the day.

Armies made it a science, because for an army the question of how much a man can carry and how far is not a fitness question. It is the question. A soldier who arrives at the fight too tired to fight has not arrived. A soldier who is carrying too much to move cannot get where the fight is. Every army in history has had to decide what goes in the pack, and every army in history has, by the account of the man this season is built around, gotten it wrong in the same direction, for the same reasons, and paid in the same coin.

His name was S. L. A. Marshall. Samuel Lyman Atwood Marshall, born in 1900, died in 1977, a journalist by trade who became the United States Army's chief combat historian in the Second World War and again in Korea, and who ended his service as a brigadier general in the reserve. His method was to interview soldiers immediately after battle, in groups, and write down what had actually happened rather than what the reports said, and it made him famous and, later, controversial; his best-known claim, about how few soldiers fired their weapons in combat, has had its methods challenged since, though later scholars examining his notes found him broadly consistent with the record. This season does not rest on that claim. It rests on a short book he published in 1950, from the same interviews and the same habit of noticing, about a subject nobody else thought worth a book.

The book is called The Soldier's Load and the Mobility of a Nation, and its argument, in a sentence, is that the American soldier was being crushed by his own pack, that the crushing was being done by his own army out of love and thoroughness, and that the weight on his back was costing lives and battles in ways that no one was counting because everyone was counting something else. Marshall's evidence was the kind this series likes: specific, documented, and occasionally absurd. Men had drowned off a Normandy beach under the weight of things they did not need. A regiment had gone ashore on an Alaskan island carrying, among other things, a book of songs.

The scenes I can give you are imagined. The facts are his, and they are next. Then the physiology he anticipated, the science the armies later paid for, and, in the last third of the season, the strange thing that happened when the soldier's march came home to civilian life as a fitness product, with a company and a Special Forces story attached, and the oldest training in the world was sold back to the people whose ancestors had simply done it.

Next episode, the beach.