USAG Stuttgart

Home of EUCOM and AFRICOM, which means you're technically responsible for two continents — Europe and Africa — but spend most of your time in a Mercedes-Benz museum wondering where your career went right, or at the Porsche factory in Zuffenhausen watching sports cars get assembled while your government sedan sits in the parking lot judging you. Stuttgart is gorgeous: vineyards on steep hillsides, the Black Forest (Schwarzwald) for hiking through actual fairy-tale scenery, Swabian cuisine that involves an alarming amount of cheese and noodles (Kässpätzle will change your life), and a beer culture that makes Colorado look like it's trying too hard. The Cannstatter Wasen is Stuttgart's version of Oktoberfest and it's arguably better because there are fewer tourists and more locals who actually know how to drink. Every European capital is a $40 Ryanair flight away — Paris, Rome, Barcelona, Prague — and your leave form has never been busier or more envy-inducing. The housing waitlist is so long that soldiers PCS before they get a house, and the temporary lodging situation has become its own support group. The COLA fluctuates with the euro and your sanity fluctuates with it, but even on a bad exchange rate day, you're living in one of Germany's most beautiful cities with the Alps drivable for a ski weekend. Staff work is staff work, but the backdrop is unbeatable.