When Harris retired from the Air Force in 1997, she was the first African-American woman ever to have attained the rank of major general in the American military. By those standards, life at a civilian company should have been a turkey shoot.

But Harris, now 60 and living in Manhattan, found being a manager at a large, private aerospace contracting company in Florida a sometimes trying experience. She liked her colleagues and made good friends, but found that the military, it was not.

"In civilian life, you can tell your boss to go fly a kite," as long as you're willing to look for another job, Harris said recently. "I didn't understand" the different attitude.

Her experiences are not unique. Every year, thousands of people, mostly in their 40s and 50s, retire from the U.S. armed forces. (Service members are eligible to retire after 20 years but those in higher enlisted and officer ranks may stay in longer if they continue to be promoted.) Some find the transition to life at civilian companies easy. But many others who have spent most of their adult lives in the military find the midlife change unsettling. It takes time to get used to not saluting the boss every time your paths cross. Others find civilian companies cold, basically unfriendly places, where people do their jobs and go home. In contrast, they say, the military is more clubby, a place where people share an intimacy formed by the prospect of facing danger.

As the conflict in Iraq winds down, military officials expect more officers and enlisted people to retire from the service, something they had put off to do what many soldiers want to do: see some action. In the next few weeks and months, those headed for retirement will attend classes on a base or a ship to learn how best to survive in civilian life, where choices are wider, decisions must be made more frequently, and help is not always as readily available as it is in the service.

Many would also agree with Harris and some other retired career officers, who say that returning to life on the outside is like having to go through a kind of basic training all over again.

The sword cuts both ways. Sometimes, military people come to civilian jobs with incorrect perceptions. "The military tends to look down at the private sector as sloppy, inefficient, lazy," said Charles Wardell, a managing director at one of the world's largest executive recruitment firms, Korn/Ferry International. It's not, of course, Wardell said. "It's just different," Wardell said. "It takes them a while to adjust to the power structure, to learn how the game is played."

Harris, for example, admits she did not know much about the civilian work world. When she left the Air Force, she got a job at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida with United Space Alliance, a company formed by aerospace giants Lockheed Martin and Boeing, to help manage the space shuttle program.

As director of aircraft maintenance for the Air Force -- her last post with the service -- Harris seemed perfectly suited to be Florida site director for USA. She loved the people she met, Harris said, but admitted that the transition was "difficult." USA, she said, "has the same hierarchy of leadership" as the military "but not the same culture of fellowship."

Harris said she was used to working with a staff. "They put me in charge of no one, though I had to be responsible for a lot of things. I had two people and a secretary," she said. In the military, Harris supervised hundreds of people, overseeing maintenance of KC-135 aerial tankers, C-130 cargo planes and F-15 fighter jets.

Harris attended Spelman College in Atlanta, where she majored in speech and drama, a long way from maintaining fighter jets and cargo planes. The Air Force sent her to aircraft maintenance school, and being a quick study, Harris learned. "I thought men had been keeping all this a secret," she said, laughing. "It wasn't all that hard."

In the service, she earned respect. "When I was in Thailand, one of my airmen said to me, 'A woman can't do this job,'" Harris recalled. "I said, 'What about me?' He said, 'You're different.'"

Things were not the same in civilian life. People weren't rude at United Space, Harris said. "It's just that they didn't have to do things," and sometimes, they would let their bosses know it. After three years, Harris resigned. She is now retired in Manhattan, engaged, and thinking of relocating to Florida.

For its part, the military tries to help those retiring after long careers. Each branch of the armed services has a transition program that offers courses that last several weeks that cover resume writing and tips on getting through a job interview. Retiring military personnel are reminded, for instance, that civilians do not use titles all the time, such as chief financial officer or chief technology officer. They're even taught to dress for success. The course isn't optional -- each retiree takes it before he or she is handed discharge papers.

Being on the outside is a surprise to many, said Bruce Gillies, a civilian transition program specialist for the Navy at a facility just outside Memphis. "All of a sudden, they have to buy clothes, suits, pay for health insurance," said Gillies, 45, who spent 21 years in the Navy.

The courses are not superficial, Gillies said. "I ask them to tell me a story about when they felt they were most successful in the military," he said. "We make a list of their transferrable skills and talk about how they get by their liabilities. One of the big things is that when they are in the military, they don't have to worry" about keeping their jobs.

But, Gillies said, despite the military's attempt to prepare retirees, some find the outside world unbearable. "We get some folks who re-enlist," Gillies said. "They miss the camaraderie, that we're all in this together, and I know the Navy will take care of me."

The courses can help, said Linda Haseloff, who left the Air Force a few years ago but remained a reservist and who just completed serving an active duty tour as a major working in public affairs at the Pentagon.

"The military life and the civilian life are two different things," said Haseloff, who is from New Mexico. "To go from wearing one uniform five days a week and then to dress as a professional person, that's a challenge. The courses helped me with that. I found it exciting to go to my closet and pick out something different every day."

Military people usually make good employees or managers because they have a commitment to getting a job done and a strong work ethic, said Wes Poriotis, chairman of Manhattan-based executive search firm Wesley Brown and Bartle. But they have problems getting jobs.

In the mid-1990s, at the request of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Bill Clinton, Poriotis founded the Center for Military and Private Sector Initiatives, a veterans' advocacy organization. The Pentagon and the White House were concerned about how transitioning military people were faring in trying to gain civilian employment.

Soon after it got started, the center, under a $24,611 Pentagon contract, conducted a study of 17,000 military personnel. Poriotis said the study revealed that two- thirds were unable to get a job interview. It's no wonder: A quarter received no responses to their calls and letters; 55 percent received from one to five calls, and only 12 percent received six or more calls.

Poriotis said many employers still retain a bitter aftertaste of the unpopular Vietnam War, associate anyone in uniform with it and reject them out of hand. Additionally, Poriotis said, the all-volunteer armed forces has become isolated from American society, leaving human resource managers unfamiliar with people in uniform and unable to gauge their abilities.

Ray Healey, a friend of Poriotis' who works with him on other projects concerning veterans, said the survey results hit the Pentagon brass hard. "The lack of responses to resumes came as a terrific surprise and a disappointment," Healey said. And, Poriotis said, "Most Americans, including business people, think veterans have it made, and that the government takes care of them."

Actually, he said, most retirees under Social Security age need jobs. One of them was Doug Swoish.

He was only 47 when he left the Navy last summer after a 21-year career -- including stints as a pilot of Grumman-built EA-6B electronic jamming planes. One of his three children is in college, another in high school and the third in elementary school.

Sitting in a deck chair or playing endless rounds of golf were not options for Swoish. He took a job at Northrop Grumman Corp. in Bethpage, where he is an electronic warfare program director.

But adjustment was an issue. "When you're in the military, the entire environment is the military family," said Swoish, who now lives in St. James. "You live on a base. You get up together, you eat together, you play sports together. That builds a cohesiveness that's so important. When you come back to civilian life, you join a culture of many families." That, he said, takes some getting used to.

Returning to civilian life after 33 years in the Marine Corps took much getting used to, admitted Jack Klimp, 57. Klimp left the corps in 2001 -- as a general, whose last assignment was as deputy commandant for manpower and reserve affairs at Marine headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Was he prepared? "I hadn't looked for a job since I was 16," he said. But Klimp worked hard at it, and he is now a senior vice president for the Phoenix House Foundation, the drug rehabilitation organization, and director of its New York regional office. What made the difference? Klimp said it is the ability to recognize similarities between civilian and military life.

"I saw an organization that bore an incredible similarity to the Marine Corps," said Klimp, referring to Phoenix House. "Both institutions are in the business of character development. The people on staff are very Marine-like. They do this job not because they're paid a lot, but because they sincerely want to do the job."

Frank Catalfamo, 56, of Bayport, did 23 years in the Army, retiring more than a decade ago as a lieutenant colonel who had been selected to make full colonel. At first, it was the little stuff that Catalfamo found hard to get used to. "It was walking around being called Frank," he said. "There was no more, 'Yes, sir' and 'No, sir,'" Catalfamo said with a laugh.

Catalfamo, who now works in Bethpage for Northrop Grumman, where he is director of naval systems integration, said it took him time to adjust to the idea that industry is driven mostly by "profit and loss," while the military concentrates heavily on "mission accomplishment." But, he said of industry these days, "I do see more visionary thought going on."

Things may never be easy for people retiring from the services and looking for civilian jobs, said Harris, the former Air Force major general. Initially, she herself went through a lot on the outside.

"We have a neat package in the military," Harris said. "We have our hospitals and our stores. When you get out into civilian life, you've got to establish a network. You've got to do things yourself. You've got to find the right grocery stores. You've got to look at prices. I never looked at prices."

Military people returning to civilian life can help their own cause. "They need to try and find out what they want to do," Harris said. "They need to prepare themselves for those roles."

As for herself, Harris said, "I'd try to be better prepared for leaving the service, instead of going out there thinking the world is waiting for me."