How do you explain to civilians what you do or did in the military?

I just tell them heavy artillery. If I get the dear in the headlights look I say "cannons". Usually then they have the idea. Slaying bodies or or keeping heaven stocked with fresh soles never went over so well.

Instead of saying "Preventive Medicine NCO" and getting that confused look, I tell people I'm a Health Inspector for the Army.

AFSC 1055B. My job was fairly easy to explain for the first 16 years of my career. I was a pilot. People thought that was cool or glamorous and seldom asked a lot more questions. "What do you fly?" was a little more difficult. Think about explaining a C-130 to a person who maybe has flown on civilian an airliner once or twice Often I said, "I fly cargo aircraft." That made people think of big UPS for FEDEX aircraft, but what the heck.

After I moved to full-time staff work on a unified command staff, it got a lot harder to explain what I did. How to put "allocate air component forces to supported commander joint operations and exercise requirements" into civilian terms? Mostly I told people it was an "office job working with people from all of the military Services."