From Anthill to Pentagon
and U.S. National Security
Hilsdon Photography
What started in an anthill in Macon has led, for Mackenzie Eaglen ’99, to the Pentagon and the highest echelons of the United States national security apparatus. And she credits her Mercer experience for preparing her to advise the nation’s top policymakers — even if her Mercer experience is what landed her in that anthill in the first place.
Eaglen, research fellow for national security studies at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, now regularly rubs elbows with high-ranking generals and admirals. Originally, though, she wanted to do more than work with them; she wanted to be one of them.
“The plan after Mercer always was I wanted to join the Army,” Eaglen said. She went to Mercer on a partial Army Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship. “I was looking at medical service,” she said. “That way you can fly helicopters.”
ROTC presented some challenges to Eaglen, who was active in many areas of student life while at Mercer. “It was very hard for me to be in a sorority and student government and wear my battle-dress uniform to class on Wednesdays,” she said with a laugh.
Nonetheless, Eaglen enjoyed her ROTC service and looked forward to her Army career once she graduated. But all that changed the summer between her junior and senior years.
While at what ROTC calls “basic camp” for officers, she went through what she described as “extensive medical screening.” That’s where her would-be military career came to an end before it even began. A test made Army officials aware of Eaglen’s severe allergy to ants — an allergy she discovered herself only a couple of years earlier, during her sophomore year, while doing physical training on campus with her ROTC unit.
“It was a cool October morning, so we trained outside,” she said. “And I was doing sit-ups and I had on full sweats, but my hair was up and I was in an anthill. And I didn’t know it because it was kind of dark out.” The ant bites caused an anaphylactic reaction so extreme that Eaglen stopped breathing, landing her in intensive care for three days.
But things were fine until the medical evaluation in the summer of 1998. When they discovered her allergies, Army officials summoned Eaglen before a board of colonels. They asked her if she really wanted to be in ROTC. “Of course!” she responded. However, she quickly realized what they were actually saying: “We aren’t asking you; you’re done. You’re booked on the next flight home,” Eaglen said. “I was devastated. And, by the way, I really didn’t have an alternate plan beyond college.”
With the help of her adviser, Dr. Eimad Houry, director of Mercer’s International Affairs Program and chair of political science, she had earlier cobbled together a foreign-relations-focused course of study from Spanish, international business and political science. It became the forerunner of Mercer’s current International Affairs Program.
But, as Eaglen said she and her Mercer friends had joked, “at a liberal-arts college and in a liberal-arts major, you know, everybody else goes on and makes money and the liberal-arts major says, ‘Do you want fries with that?’”
Now that her long-planned Army career had evaporated, Eaglen didn’t have any idea what she could do with her degree that would lead to gainful employment. More immediately, she didn’t know how she was even going to pay for her senior year.
But Mercer officials helped her figure out both pretty quickly. The admissions staff with whom she worked as a Student Advisory Board member and summer intern, she said, went to bat for her to replace her scholarship money. While all of the aid had already been disbursed for the year, Eaglen said, the officials helped her stitch together a patchwork of aid sources, from loans to obscure scholarship funds. The director of admissions, she said, “just really came through for me.”
The next goal, Eaglen noted, was to figure out what the heck to do with the international affairs degree she’d be earning in less than a year.
Dr. Houry helped with that. “He said I need to go to Washington and graduate school,” Eaglen said. “And I didn’t know where to go to school and I didn’t know what to get a degree in. I just knew I wanted to do defense policy.”
She went to a graduate school fair and visited officials from several schools, but didn’t even think about stopping at the Georgetown University table. “I thought I’d never get in” to one of their prestigious graduate programs, she said. But the Georgetown representative grabbed Eaglen’s arm on her way out of the fair and asked her why she hadn’t stopped at his table. She was persuaded to apply to the National Security Studies program. Much to her surprise, she got in.
The Georgetown experience led to a fellowship to work in several of the top offices at the Pentagon studying how the military works at its highest levels. Her first day on the job ended up being Sept. 11, 2001. “Obviously that will shape your world view,” she said.
That experience and her training led her to become an expert on national security issues, including military readiness, reforms and modernization. Her current work at The Heritage Foundation involves not only research on those subjects, but educating both military and civilian officials about them — and about each other.
“I kind of joke that my job is a translator for the executive branch to the legislative and back,” she said. “They don’t talk to each other as much as you might think, and they don’t understand each other.”
While Heritage is the nation’s most prominent conservative think tank, Eaglen said her job is less ideological than that of many of her colleagues, because having a strong defense is, by definition, a non-partisan issue. Her work, she said, is focused on increasing policymakers’ knowledge base about military issues so they make better decisions.
While previous Capitol Hill experience working for moderate Republican members of Congress has helped prepare her for her current bipartisan work, Eaglen said, her liberal arts experience at Mercer prepared her as well.
For one, it taught her research and critical-thinking skills. “This might sound like a given, but it’s not at think tanks in Washington: I let the research drive the recommendations rather than just saying I know what the military needs to do and fitting my research into that,” Eaglen said.
Also, knowing how to write effectively — she notes her many essay-based exams at Mercer — is another aspect of “what gives you critical-thinking sills and what separates, basically, the men from the boys when it comes to analysis,” she said.
And her out-of-classroom experience also helped. Besides ROTC, student government and Greek life in her Mercer days, Eaglen also served as a student leader in residence life.
In her current job, she said, Eaglen has a similar dynamic — working with diverse “stakeholders” in various agencies, with widely different interests and institutional cultures. “There’s nobody I don’t work with,” she said. “I have to put on a different hat every single day. One day it’s the Army, the next day it’s the Navy. It’s about being an interdisciplinary person; that’s what you’re taught. And that’s what an education at Mercer is; it’s interdisciplinary.”