The USS Enterprise Coffee Disaster
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, Americans drink millions of cups of coffee every day, and the United States Armed Forces have long depended on it too. Our regular contributor out of Colorado, Richard Muniz, traces the history of coffee in America through wartime stories before sharing a hilarious tale from the USS Enterprise (CVN-65), where one sailor’s attempt to make the greatest cup of coffee on the ship went spectacularly wrong.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.4 | This is our American stories, and we tell stories about everything here on the show. |
| 0:19.8 | And this next one, well, it's about something so many of us do every day. |
| 0:24.6 | Americans drink about 400 million cups of coffee. |
| 0:28.6 | The drink itself represents 75% of our yearly caffeine consumption. |
| 0:34.6 | So, needless to say, this drink is important to us. It's also important |
| 0:39.5 | to the U.S. military. And today, Richard Munis, our regular contributor and listener, shares |
| 0:45.3 | an entertaining story on the subject. Take it away, Richard. |
| 0:58.7 | There's an old expression that goes that an army travels on its belly. |
| 1:03.8 | Well, if that's true, then coffee is the lubrication that runs that army. |
| 1:07.3 | And if you've been in the military before, you know this is very important. |
| 1:09.9 | 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 when 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 and stuff 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 MRI packets in. Mixing a little bit of hot chocolate, |
| 1:46.0 | a little bit creamy sugar. Hey, no, good coffee. |
| 1:50.4 | Coffee has been a part of every armed forces that I know of. |
| 1:53.7 | If you're a fan of the movie Master and Commander, |
| 1:56.3 | there's a scene in there where Aubrey's cabin boy comes up and says, there's no more coffee, |
| 1:58.4 | and Aubrey says, fine, we'll drink tea. |
| 2:01.2 | Well, it just shows you how important it has been. |
| 2:06.0 | Now, even during the Civil War, it was very important. |
| 2:08.9 | Soldiers would ride home and they'd tell about the battlefield experiences and stuff like that, |
| 2:12.6 | but the word coffee was used more than anything else. |
... |
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