An Army Moves on Its Stomach... And Lots of Coffee

On this episode of Our American Stories, Richard Muniz, our regular contributor from Colorado, shares the story of a coffee incident aboard the USS Enterprise.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
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 four hundred million cups of coffee. The
drink itself represents seventy five percent of our yearly caffeine consumption. So,

(00:30):
needless to say, this drink is important of us. It's
also important to the US military. And today Richard Munez,
our regular contributor and listeners, shares an entertaining story on
the subject. Take it away, Richard.

Speaker 2 (00:50):
There's an all expression that goes that an army travels
on this belly. Well that's true. Then coffee is a
lubrication that runs that army. And if you've been in
the military before, you know this is very important. Coffee.
It just makes it so much easier. I know, when
we deployed to the golf, for instance, we took cooking utensils.

(01:10):
The only time we actually used those cooking the tensils
was once we made some French fries 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
air of towns is 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's

(01:32):
what they just did was to heat up their water
in their little canteen cups, put the instant coffee from
the MRI packets in there, mixing a little bit of
hot chocolate, little of 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,

(01:55):
will drink tea. Well, it just shows you how important
it's been now. Even during the Civil War, it was
very important. Soldiers would ride home and they'd tell about
the battlefield experiences and stuff like that, but the word
coffee was used more than anything else. One soldier wrote
home and he was complaining about lack of food, lack

(02:15):
of morale, lack of this, lack of that, but he
specifically spelled out coffee. In fact, he said, how can
you possibly soldier without coffee. The Confederacy didn't have a
lot of coffee to have. What they used to do
was they would go out and they would trade with
the Union soldiers when there was no fighting going on
like that. They would meet in a guess, some neutral

(02:36):
zone as you would want to call it that, and
they would trade. They would trade tobacco, which they had
plenty of, for coffee. The average Union soldier got well
over thirty pounds of coffee a year as personal ration.
So they had the coffee with some of the Union
got all the way through World War One coffee, World
War two coffee. In fact, some of those iconic images
that came out of World War Two concerned coffee. He

(02:58):
was a gi this little ten up there, and he's
toasting the folks back home with a hot cup of coffee.
Very important. Coffee has played a very important part for
all of us. A friend of mine tells me a story.
He was a navy, not the army, and now I

(03:20):
need to qualify something here. I don't know how true
this story is. I know nothing about ships, I know
nothing about the traditions on ships, and he tells me
this story. For all I know, maybe he's told for
somebody else. Maybe he' hallucinated. I don't know, but it's
such a cool story I'm gonna tell it to you. Anyway,

(03:41):
he went through basically, he went through a school and
all stuff, and he did really, really well, and they said, hey,
you did so well, we're going to give you your
choice of assignments. Well, here's a Trekky like Star Trek,
and if you can't have Jim Kirk's Enterprise or John
luc Picard's Enterprise, you settle for the one you got.
In this case, nuclear aircraft carrier Enterprise we have today.

(04:04):
He wants the bridge of the Enterprise, thinking it will
be a fat chance he ever gets it. Well, guess
what he got it? Well, apparently there was a tradition
on the bridge of the Enterprise. And like I said,
I've never tried to check this out. So you know,
if there is great, If there isn't, forgive me. What
happens on the Enterprise. Is this the lowest rank in
em on the bridge makes the coffee. Okay, that's pretty cool. Okay,

(04:31):
So he gets up there and he decides, I am
going to make the best cup of coffee the Captain's
ever had, and he's got, you know, visions of promotions
dancing in his head or whatever the case may be.
But he wants to make sure the captain never ever
forgets him. So he goes out and he studies how
to make coffee, and he goes to libraries, reading every

(04:52):
book he can find, every article, stuff like that. He
goes to barista's, who make coffee for a living, who
learns their secrets and whatnot. By the time he's finished,
the only two entities in the entire universe and know
more about making coffee than him is God and the
guy in the folder's commercial. So he goes out there
and his first dawn the bridge, he makes the coffee.

(05:15):
The smell coffee weference of the bridge. I mean, this
phenomenal coffee smells smells great. Okay. The other tradition they
had on the bridge was no one gets their cup
until the captain gets his cool tradition. Well, he's sitting
there and waiting for the captain and all that stuff,
because he's sitting and going, oh yeah, yeah, the Captain's
gonna take it, and he's gonna look at it, and
he can sit back in that chain and go, oh yeah,

(05:37):
this is a cup of coffee. Well, the captain comes up,
captain on the bridge and all that stuff. The captain
comes up, he's talking to everybody, ports this cup of
coffee and sits down in his chair and he's there talking,
got his reports in front of him, but just puts
his cup of coffee there on the his armchair and

(05:57):
he's reading the reports, talking and stuff. And then he
reaches over here's the moment of truth, picks up the
coffee mug and takes a sip of it. And he's
sitting there expecting the captain to smile. But that's not
what happened. The captain spews this coffee all over. A

(06:20):
master chief that standing in drops the cup of coffee
like it was a snake, stands up and scans the bridge,
and his says's eyes locked on him and said, what
in the hell is wrong with you? Apparently there's two
types of water spickets on the ship. There's fresh water,

(06:41):
which is what you drink, and then there's seawater, which
you use for other purposes. He didn't know the difference.
When it came time for promotion time, guess what they
didn't forget him either.

Speaker 1 (06:54):
And great job is always to Monty Montgomery for producing
that piece, and thanks to Richard mune for his story
stories about coffee and coffee in the military particularly and again,
if you have stories to share with us. We love
hearing from listeners, and we've got a bunch of great
listener contributions. Go to our Americanstories dot com Richard Munez's

(07:16):
story Coffee in the Military here on our American Story Folks,
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(07:37):
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