In 2005, Susan Eaton’s husband, Chief Master Sgt. Bryan Eaton, was named the Exchange’s senior enlisted advisor. Susan Eaton, who already had 20 years of accounting experience, had other job opportunities when they moved to Dallas. But she chose the Exchange.
“I looked at the market, and this was the first choice,” said Susan, now vice president of Audit. “I mean, how convenient to work at the same place that your husband works. That absolutely was part of the draw to it. But there’s also the giving back to the military community and that sense of connection.”
After Chief Eaton’s Exchange service ended when he retired in 2008, Susan Eaton stayed on, starting as a junior auditor and rising through the ranks until she was named to her current position in 2015. At the end of August, she will join her husband in retirement after 21 years with the Exchange.
A family of heroes
Susan comes from a family of heroes.
“It starts with my dad,” she said. “He was a C-47 pilot in World War II. He towed the gliders that went into the Netherlands to support Operation Market Garden. He transported supplies for the Battle of the Bulge. And he transported some of the former prisoners of war back to safety.
“Then you take my husband, who is a 30-year chief master sergeant in the Air Force. He had deployments, for example, after the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996. And then right after 9/11, he was deployed to Egypt to secure that area in a security forces function.”
In addition, her youngest son, William, just earned the rank of master sergeant in the Air Force, and is serving in a contingency location.
“My dad also went into the retail,” she said. “So I have that connection, too. And my oldest son, Adam, is involved in retail at GameStop, where he oversees the risk-management program.”
Finding her path
Susan grew up in Long Beach, California, and attended California State University at Long Beach, where she earned her Bachelor of Business Administration and Accounting degrees. Cal State was only a 15-minute bike ride from the house where she grew up. She didn’t leave Long Beach until she married Bryan—but then she got to see a lot of the world.
“I got married right out of college,” she said. “Bryan had a short-term assignment to Korea while we were engaged. Two weeks later, after he got back, we got married, and moved from Southern California to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma. So it was a little bit of a change.”
That was when she started becoming familiar with the Exchange.
“As a young bride, living on base, I definitely used the Exchange and the commissary,” she said. “The Exchange played a big part in setting up a household. I considered employment at that time with the Exchange too. I had an accounting degree and looked into it as a potential employer even back then.”
Although she had an accounting degree, Susan didn’t care for the monthly and yearly business cycles of a traditional accounting job. The auditing side of finance got her attention, so her accounting roles even before joining the Exchange team gravitated to those business functions.
“It was after getting my MBA that I was able to apply my accounting knowledge along with holistic knowledge to perform audits,” she said. “Because when you’re doing an internal audit, you’re not only looking at the accounting processes. You’re looking at the business processes. It was after I started here at the Exchange that it really coalesced.”
The rocky road to the Exchange
Before coming to the Exchange, the Eatons lived on several military installations: After Tinker, assignments included Torrejon Air Base in Spain, March ARB in California and Hill AFB in Utah. It was during their time at Hill AFB that Susan earned master’s in business administration from Weber State University.
“Adam was born in the Torrejon hospital the day it was closed down for the Persian Gulf War,” she said. “The anesthesiologist was pulled off a plane to Kuwait to assist with a C-section. Adam was born at 12:09 a.m. and the anesthesiologist promptly went back to the airfield to continue on his assignment in Kuwait.”
Their last stop before the Exchange was F.E. Warren AFB in Wyoming, the oldest continuously active military installation in the Air Force.
“When Bryan got the assignment there over a Valentine’s Day weekend, he said, ‘Let’s go check it out and see where we’re going to’,” Susan said. “It was drizzly and sleeting and if you take the drive from Utah to F.E. Warren on I-80 and you get to Vedauwoo [about 35 miles west of Warren], it’s just a bunch of rocks. And I said, ‘Oh my gosh, Bryan, what are you doing to us? All they do here is grow rocks.’
“But it turned out to be one of the best assignments. The community there is very tight-knit. And the history is amazing. Our house was just around the corner from where General Pershing used to live.” (Pershing, a World War I hero who attained the rare rank of General of the Armies—the equivalent of a six-star general—was also the son-in-law of Sen. F.E. Warren, the base’s namesake.)
The Eatons were at Warren when they got the news that Bryan had been selected as the Exchange’s senior enlisted advisor. The move to the Dallas area took some getting used to.
“Whenever we could, we had lived in base housing, being part of that military community,” she said. “It was kind of weird being in the Dallas area, being separated from that. You don’t get that military community feel. Being exposed to that environment and helping out and giving back in that environment were definitely draws in my wanting to be employed here.”
Within a couple of years, Susan would be in a military environment when she deployed to Kuwait—the first of five deployments.
From 2007 to 2013, she deployed to Kuwait and Iraq twice apiece, and to Afghanistan once, in support of contingency inventory observations. Her service earned her the Global War on Terrorism Service Medal.
The deployments were shorter than other Exchange deployments, and her main interaction with troops was in dining facilities. But she worked a lot with local national associates in all three countries.
“In Afghanistan, I met Afghan citizens and learned about some of the sacrifices they had to make to be employed at the Exchange,” she said. “And in Kuwait, I talked to the various associates there and learned just how much they did for the Exchange. It was very informative and I felt blessed for having had that exposure.”
Staying with the Exchange
When Susan joined the Exchange, she knew she wanted to stay.
“After following my husband’s career for 26 years, stability was very important to me,” she said. “And having a stable career, one that I could sink my teeth into and really get involved, was also very important.”
In November 2006, Susan started her road to success in Audit, where she conducted an audit to evaluate Exchange compliance with anti-money laundering regulations. The audit led to stronger oversight at HQ and in the field. Before the audit took place, the Exchange was on the brink of losing its contract with Western Union because of a lack of a strong compliance program.
“It was after that audit that the Exchange put a monitoring program in place, which helped to retain the Western Union contract,” Susan said. “I’m very proud of that audit. I was such a young auditor to be assigned that as a lead and a sole auditor on that one. That was huge.”
Susan said she’s also proud of mentoring Audit team members and helping them develop.
“This has been such a wonderful career. The people that I’ve met in this division and the people I work with are such a talented group of folks. I couldn’t do my job without them. They are integral to this.”
Retirement plans
Susan and her husband plan to stay in Dallas-Fort Worth, where their son Adam and youngest grandchild also live. But they also plan to travel.
“Wherever my youngest son and my other two grandchildren are living, we’ll want to visit with them,” she said. “And Bryan and I love fishing in Alaska. We were just there a few weeks ago—we have a spot where we go halibut and salmon fishing.
“I don’t want to continue to work. That’s not kind of the direction I’m going. It’s going to be more about family and spending time with my best friend — my husband. Time spent with Bryan is the best time I can have on this earth.”
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