Grande White Chocolate Double Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino Blended Creme, please

Although I am not a coffee drinker, I have always found the aroma of this pungent bean somehow comforting.  Well comfort now abounds in Baghdad as yesterday we witnessed the arrival of almost 5,000 lbs of Starbucks coffee courtesy of our American Red Cross corporate partnership with the company. We received 6 pallets of the grounds, each weighing between 600 and 800 lbs and the majority of which is now stored in the conex out by our office.

Now I should explain that the military units know about this lucrative partnership with the coffee giant and I can attest that from the first 24 hours I spent in Baghdad I was interrogated as to where we were hiding the coffee. I remember vividly sitting in the Green Bean Coffee just 24 hours after arriving in Iraq and being approached by a group of soldiers inquiring when they could pick up more coffee. 

Well now that we are back in the distribution business we are trying to keep this high demand product as hush-hush as possible for fear of an onslaught by units driving over pick up trucks to haul away caseloads of the valuable substance...which is apparently what happened with the last shipment! So we are surreptitiously trying to both distribute the coffee to the remote FOBs (Forward Operating Base) in which a high class luxury like Starbucks is merely a memory while at the same time trying to come up with a plan to distribute locally without total pandemonium.

More to come on this I suspect... 

;-)