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 Munis, our regular contributor and

listeners, 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

they heat up their water

...