When you arrive at your deployed location, there is no “grace period” to get situated, catch up on sleep and learn your way around. From the moment boots hit the ground, you drop your bags at lodging, undergo a rapid in-processing (mine took less than a half-hour), gulp some coffee if it’s handy and get to work.

In my case, lodging is “Tent City” — a row of, yes, tents, filled with bunk beds and wall lockers. In the desert heat of the Middle East, the tents are air-conditioned at full blast; enough that at night I sleep in sweats, socks and a beanie.

Note that while tent cities are par for the course in the Army & Marines, less so in the Air Force. Due to an error with lodging–I was originally assigned a corner room only to find a female occupant sleeping inside, not amused at being woken up by a strange man–I was promptly re-assigned to the tents.

On any given day a tent might cover 1-20 people. The unspoken rule is that you keep it quiet. No loud music (headphones are cheap), no phone calls (do that at the USO or a common area). At first it’s startling to bump into strangers constantly coming and going in the middle of the night; soon you grow numb to it.

So what does an air base in a forward-deployed location look like? Picture a community built on nothing but rocks, sand and mud, a series of flight lines and runways surrounded by lookalike warehouses and trailers, all the same light beige color. Every building, identified only by a four-digit number, looks as though it should be hosting inmates, factory workers or farm animals.

No matter what your job is in the military, while deployed you will be working long hours at a stretch. Twelve-hour days, six days a week is the norm. And of course it’s hot. Damn hot. To quote a line from Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues:

“Boy, it’s hot. It never got this hot in Brooklyn. This is like Africa hot. Tarzan couldn’t take this kind of hot.”

Neil Simon wrote a military comedy set in Mississippi, but there is nothing comic about deployment. Through it all, the sun never stops blazing and you never stop sweating. This is why they call it “service,” and it’s right there in the Air Force Core Values: “Integrity First. Service Above Self. Excellence in All We Do.”

Note these are not complaints, only observations. This is what I signed on for; this is the calling I answered.

Coming next: “Public Affairs, Desert Style”