During Trevor Tomkins’ initial overseas deployment seven years ago, he faced considerable danger from roadside bombs and gunfire as his transportation unit ferried troops and supplies from Kuwait into Iraq.

During his second deployment, this time to Afghanistan, he worked in the relatively secure environment of Bagram Air Base, in the logistics section of 2nd Brigade headquarters.

“This time (the stress) was, you never got a break, just long hours every single day,” he said. “It made time go fast, but it was clearly just a different type of stress, because there were lives on the lines that we were trying to support. If they didn’t have the resources they needed, their mission would fail.”

For the past 12 years, Tomkins has worked at Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. in Des Moines as a project manager. A 21-year Army National Guard veteran, Tomkins enlisted on his 17th birthday as a way to pay for college.

It was during his annual Guard training in July 2010 that Tomkins, a sergeant first class, was notified that he would be deployed to Afghanistan with the logistics section of the 2nd Brigade.

“They didn’t know exactly what I’d be doing, and to tell you the truth, I was a jack-of-all-trades and did a lot of different things over there,” he said. “My transportation experience came in handy, and my office skills here as a project manager certainly helped over there. I was able to manage a lot of different tasks for them and do it well without it being overwhelming.”

While he was deployed, Tomkins’ co-workers at Nationwide pitched in to drop off meals on a weekly basis to his family, and even spent time with his children. The support was one of the reasons he has stayed with Nationwide for so long, Tomkins said. “It would make it very difficult to manage and juggle both these careers if you didn’t have someone that supported it.”

At that time, between 35,000 and 40,000 troops were living on the base, which has a perimeter of about eight miles. “So to have that many people in such a small area, we were basically stacked on top of each other. With the surge, we had no place to put people, and that’s why Bagram got so overcrowded,” he said.

The living quarters at the base were stacked boxcar containers with the inside walls cut out to form 16-by-20-foot rooms that three to four people would sleep in. Though equipped with air conditioning and heat, the quarters were located so close to the runways that the vibration from the F-15 fighters taking off would shake any loose items off of shelves. “There were a lot of sleepless nights for the first few weeks, and then you got to the point where you were so tired you could sleep through anything,” Tomkins recalled.

The Taliban would also lob mortars or rockets at the base on a regular basis. “The joke was always that after an indirect-fire attack that we were all supposed to get together,” Tomkins said. “Well, good luck, because nothing would wake you up anymore. Luckily, nobody from our unit was hurt by those attacks, but they were fairly frequent.”

Tomkins said the toughest parts of the deployments are the transitions from civilian to military life and back again.

“It’s a big culture shock to shift gears and get thrown into substandard living conditions, extremely long hours and never getting a day off,” he said. “Then you finally get used to that and think that it’s normal to live in those kinds of conditions, and then you come back and take a month off. It bothers you to no end to sit and not have anything to do, and then it’s time to come back to a full-time job that you haven’t even thought about for a year.”

Tomkins said he hopes to get one more promotion within the next couple of years before retiring from the Guard.

“At 38, it seems like I’m too young to retire from anything, but it really adds up fast when you started at 17,” he said.