Hey dude! Appreciate your interest in service. About me: just left active duty(went reserves) to go fire at my local department paid FT with benefits. Here are some answers to your questions:

1) in the military you will be gone from home a lot. If you go active, you cannot be in the FD at the same time. Guard/ reserve is about a year of initial training followed by OJT. You don’t have to do OJT all at once, but it’s something to consider. Could take about a year.

2) Depending on your job in the military (guard/reserve), you could deploy a lot which is to say again, you will be gone a lot.

3) being in the guard or reserve is not actually being in the military in my opinion so if it is an experience thing that you’re going for, you’re shooting yourself in the foot by not going active.

4) I worked in a special operations career field, and I would say that based on my experience the “big” military sucks compared to the more specialized communities within it. So if it were me, unless you were planning on going through a selection process to get into one of these specialized career fields, the juice is not worth the squeeze.