But after each overseas deployment the transition to family life grew more difficult.
Those exercises, the Navy says, are essential to prepare sailors and marines for overseas deployment.
It will be the largest overseas deployment of South Korean troops since the Vietnam War.
It will be the unit's first overseas deployment since World War II.
In 2008, Iraq was the biggest overseas deployment of US troops, now Afghanistan dominates.
Mr. Clinton asked the Navy to find an alternative site to the Vieques range, which the Navy considers indispensable to prepare sailors and marines for overseas deployment.
Rather, in May, he refused to report to an office that takes care of the paperwork for overseas deployment, a relatively minor offense.
On the day of the attack, dozens of witnesses are said to have seen Hasan enter a section of the base used to prepare soldiers for overseas deployment.
Nearby, a medical company is not getting ready for its overseas deployment, either; the soldiers are instead building aid stations in southwestern Texas.
It will be the largest overseas deployment by Japan since the second world war, and, significantly, is not underwritten by a Security Council resolution (though one may yet come).
Critics of America's decade of conflict in the region since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, seized on the stresses experienced in the war by soldiers like Sergeant Bales, who was on his fourth overseas deployment in 10 years.
