What does a 14E actually do on deployment?

Trust me, unless your in the van, not a damned thing. Probably be on gate guard, and depending on the command team, probably busy work. Filling sand bags, or sweeping sand off the walkways. Typical ADA nonsense.

From my understanding you're pretty much on alert 24/7, function checks, daily maintainence.

I’m currently deployed at the moment, 14e and I’m a tca. You pretty much will pull a 24 hour shift, be off for 24, and then come back on the next day for 8 hours to do any sort of busy work around the pat site. During your 24 hours on shift, you’ll either be training, doing some sort of maintenance or running tests on the radar, making sure all paperwork is straight, and chilling in the crew shack watching movies with the tangos. And if you’re lucky enough to be a tca, any time they come at you with some pointless tasking you can just run off and say you have to do something in the ecs and they’ll take your word for it.