You can be a civilian and tasked with rerouting | patching the navigation and steer by wire systems of an oversized fishing trawler refitted to perform seismic survey while the majority of the crew fight a fire underneath the kerosene filled cable spools (with kilometers of microphone cables) during a monsoon storm.

That's fun, luckily most people in such situations tend to be pragmatic task solving types and few are loose cannon BP observers bouncing about screaming "I'm a teapot!" and "The pirates will get us if we don't drown!"

You don't have to be in the military to get caught up in surprise popgun atomic testing twixt India and Pakistan - you just have to be the bunny that took on a radiometric survey contract at third hand.

In hindsight these, and other adventures, are all part of the job and not worth quitting over.

As long as you're not the type that gets in a flap about every shipboard fire and runs about like a headless chicken, of course.