Some of the other challenges Bruce didn't mention is that you will need to hone your public persona to a razor's edge. In the field you are the public face of FEMA and all kinds of people will be coming to you for all kinds of help. You will on many occasions be working with people who before the disaster were living in abject poverty and now they have absolutely nothing or... be pretending that this is the case, you will have to decide.

You will be daily on the firing line making decisions that will effect the lives of many others and will be caring a great responsibility, it starts out bad and only gets worse so expect it. Everything that can go wrong will go wrong exactly at the worse time.

On the other hand, months after my deployment I was still receiving letters from people who I took the time to help, anyway like Bruce said it ain't for everyone and I doubt I will go out on another deployment but it was a great experience.