Active duty means you're full time army. Reserve means you have a civilian job and live off-base and train on evenings and weekends.
When you're active duty, you go when your unit is scheduled to rotate. It's entirely possible (though extremely unlikely in the current US military) to do an entire term of service and never get deployed. When you're not overseas, you're in garrison, occastionally doing field training, but the truth is it involves alot of boredom and cleaning your vehicles for the umpteenth time. This all goes back to what I've been saying about the military not being like the movies, truth is you spend the vast majority of your time, including overseas, physically uncomfortable and bored out of your skull. Even as an infantryman you're unlikely to actually fire your weapon more than a few times a year. In all honesty, if they made a movie about what military life is actually like, nobody would watch it.
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