Dude, I understand that completely but let me share a little with you. My cousin (yeah, there are a LOT of us in the Army ) was an 11 series, I forget which one (TOW gunner) and he was always taking some class on downtime or studying for some CLEP test or another while he was deployed. During on of his re-enlistments, he went into EOD and did that for four years.
It is a lot easier now with Online classes and distance learning to get an education while in the service.
When I was a private in the early '90's it was almost impossible to get. Unless you never deployed. I deployed a lot. I was single and it was were the money is even today.