This is an I-Heart podcast.

This is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything here on the show.

And this next one, well, it's about something so many of us do every day.

Americans drink about 400 million cups of coffee.

The drink itself represents 75% of our yearly caffeine consumption.

So, needless to say, this drink is important to us. It's also important to the

U.S. military. And today, Richard Muniz, our regular contributor and listener, shares an

entertaining story on the subject. Take it away, Richard.

There's an old expression that goes that an army travels on its belly. Well, if that's true, then coffee is the lubrication that runs that army.

And if you've been in the military before, you know this is very important.

Coffee just makes it so much easier.

I know when we deployed to the Gulf, for instance, we took cooking utensils.

The only time we actually used those cooking utensils was once we made some french fries,

out of some potatoes we found.

But the one thing that got used constantly was the coffee pot.

Now we didn't take coffee with us, but the first time anybody went to one of the local Arab towns like that, guess what they bought? Coffee. And we'd make coffee every morning we got up. Some people didn't want to sit there and wait for it. What they just did was to heat up their water in their little canteen cups. Put the instant coffee from the MRA packets in there. Mixing a little bit of hot chocolate, a little bit creamy sugar.

Hey, no, good coffee.

Coffee has been a part of every armed forces that I know of.

If you're a fan of the movie Master and Commander,

there's a scene where Aubrey's cabin boy comes up and says,

there's no more coffee, and Aubrey says, fine, we'll drink tea.

Well, it just shows you how important it has been.

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