Eldon Mullis Put ‘the Right Soldier at the Right Place’

For 27 years, Eldon Mullis helped put soldiers where they were needed and got them what they needed when they needed it. Now he’s meeting the needs of soldiers’ families when they most need help.

Mullis retired last September as chief of staff of Army Human Resources Command and immediately moved to a civilian job with Army Emergency Relief (AER). AER is a private, non-profit organization that helps soldiers and their families with expenses like food, rent or utilities, emergency transportation and vehicle repair, funeral expenses, medical expenses, or personal needs when pay is delayed or stolen.

Mullis’ career began at Georgia Southern as a member of the first ROTC cadet class commissioned by the University in 1982. It took him from the U.S. to Germany, where he met his future wife, Doris, to Kosovo and back, with numerous stops in between. His last post was Army Human Resources Command in Alexandria, Va., where he was tasked with matching soldiers with jobs that needed to be done by Army personnel around the world.

“We manned the entire Army,” said Mullis. “What that means is, if you look across all the divisions, all the soldiers, all the units across the Army, we send them there. The way we did that is we looked through all our personnel models and determined what skill sets were needed, what grades (ranks) are needed, and we determined who needed what. We found these soldiers and we got them to the unit at the right time. We like to say, ‘The right soldier at the right place at the right time.'”

His responsibilities also included overseeing postal operations, mortuary services, awards, voter registration and absentee ballots, retirement services and post-Army educational services under the New GI Bill. In his last year in the Army, he helped facilitate the consolidation of offices from Alexandria, St. Louis and Indianapolis to their new assignment at Fort Knox.

“I owe a lot to Georgia Southern,” Mullis said. At one time, he said, five Georgia Southern ROTC alumni were working in his Alexandria headquarters of Human Resources Command. “And that said something, because the guys who came there were hand-picked. Those are the ones we wanted to bring here to take care of the soldiers out there in the field, so it really speaks highly of Georgia Southern’s ROTC program and also the campus and the academics that the school puts everybody through.”

Mullis said one of his proudest moments in his 27-year Army career was as a battalion commander seeing the result of his unit’s actions in support of the peacekeeping mission in Kosovo. “I’ve been a finance officer my whole career,” he said, including work done for the Secretary of Defense to help revamp housing allowances for soldiers.

As a finance officer, he said, “We brought the Army’s checkbook, if you want to look at it that way. We started buying things like gravel, plywood and baked bread. By the time we finished we had built a small installation that had a circumference of about five miles around.” In Kosovo, where there had been no installation, he left buildings and roads. There was “a really good installation on the top of that hillside and a lot of it had to do with my soldiers writing contracts and providing services for the soldiers,” said Mullis.

“I’ve been working with AER since September and love every minute of it,” said Mullis. “This past year, we provided more than $81 million in assistance to more than 71,000 soldiers, retirees and their family members. We also provide scholarships for children and spouses of soldiers to attend college.

“At the end of the day, I leave the office with a sense that we have helped an Army family that is selflessly serving or has served our great nation.”