On the plus side, you get to spend time at home. Your C-17 bros may indeed be having fun in Italy, Germany, Spain, wherever...but they're also on the road 200+ days a year. If you think six month deployments are rough on the family, try being gone more often than you are home.
Abilene, Rapid City, and Shreveport are not as bad as you make them out to be. There's also the Guam trips with stops in S. Korea, Japan, and Australia now that B-1s are part of Global Strike.