This afternoon I came home from lunch and, as usual, I fired up the PC and logged onto Twitter. A new Online Friend Jennifer Navarrete, podcaster on The MorningBrewCast, had a Twit about an online video she saw. It was "a 24 second video from a guy who swears the best way to enjoy coffee is to do it outside in the cold." She then posted a link to the video and the following question: "So does it look like it was fun?"
I responded, "some of my best times with coffee have been in a cold wet foxhole." By now you know that I was an Infantryman in the U.S. Army. My first duty assignment took me to Germany. If you have ever been to Central Europe you know that the winters can get pretty brutal and being an Infantryman meant that you had to be out in the elements, no matter what. When others had the luxury of going inside when the first winds of winter blew across the German countryside, we dug in.
Yep, we dug foxholes or where local restrictions prevented digging we built above ground fortified fighting positions w/overhead cover. So nothing warms one up faster than digging a hole in the ground or filling hundreds, if not thousands, of sandbags to make the fortified fighting positions. However, at the end of a long cold winter day there was nothing better than a hot cup of joe...java...kaffee...coffee.
While the Army is not known for its gourmet coffee selection, well at least not in the mid 1980s. Coffee, back then, came in one flavor and one color: BLACK. Yes, the flavor and the color were the same, trust me. Anyway, there was nothing like leaning on the back wall of the foxhole or against the stack of sandbags as the wind blew across the treeline, the leaves blown across the Grunewald floor, bare tree branches scraping against one another, and sipping on a canteen cup full of piping hot coffee.
It wasn't that it was hot coffee on a cold day, but that it was a brief refuge from the Army. It was a moment that we had to ourselves. It allowed us to be civilians yet again it gave us a moment to reflect on our past while still being firmly rooted in our present. Well, fast forward to today, every once in a while I will pour a cup of coffee and walk out on the porch on a cold night or a rainy day and enjoy. For a few minutes I am back with the friends of my youth. Sometimes, I can almost hear my old roommate, Dan Braun, bitch about how we have to be in the woods while there is a perfectly dry and warm barracks room a few miles away, and on those exceptionally still nights, I can almost hear my Platoon Sergeant, Mel Huff, moving about in the forest and walking smack into a low hanging branch. It really happened (I won't write about the night he fell in a foxhole).
Excuse me, now it's time to brew a pot of coffee.
tags used: Dave Guerra, Coffee, Grunewald, Foxholes, Fighting Positions, Army, Jennifer Navarrete, Morning BrewCast
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