The thing is that the game prevent you from accessing inventory when someone have a brain eater on him... But there is two workarounds for this: 1) you should never send squaddies alone anyways. The other members of his group should have ample time to kill the thing, assuming you manually target the alien for them and you set them to autofire (quickfire).
Autofire work for every weapon in this game... What it really means is that the squaddie won't take time to aim and his aim may be drastically lowered when he does unless he have an incredibly high shooting skill. At the very end of the game most of my (old) squaddies can fire most weapons with normal or even autofire without even losing accuracy... It is then a matter of deciding how fast I actually want them to shoot versus ammo usage.
2) If you have more than one squaddie alive, simply pause the game and go into another squaddie inventory. Then click on the name of the poor soul on the right and you'll magically have access to his inventory. You can then switch weapon(s) for a grenade and set it to blow up immediately then drop it on the ground. The squaddie will probably be injured from this blast but the brain eater will without a doubt die in the explosion. This is of course better to use this strategy when you have a lone squaddie stranded alone somewhere... That's why I always equip all my squaddies with at least one explosion grenade. It saves lives, especially the lives of trained soldiers.
You have access to the best human made armor from the get go in this game. Marsec armor, which comes about one week later after starting the game, is too weak to be used on anybody short of those who have an awful strenght score. The torso can be useful if you want flying squaddies but the armor is not good enough to stand most Alien weapons hit to maximize survivability. And in this game, unlike other X-com games, you want your men to survive because their stats improve directly with their kills and fresh recruits always suck. In the mid game you should have your full trained squad with replacements and use training facilities to get recruits up to speed before sending them into the fray.
At the beginning of the game, the Aliens are quite weak and they have poor or no weapons at all. You should have at least one squad member per group with a machine gun, especially those who have poor accuracy. It fires so fast in auto mode that it won't matter if you spray the whole room while firing at close range. Squadies with high accuracy and high strenght should be given the sniper laser rifle and those with high accuracy and low strenght should be given the autocannon or whatever the name.
This setup may sound awkward but it is the best way to ensure that most of your squadies even up by the time you need them to fight real opponents. Use mainly sniper riffles for long range, autocannons for med range and machine guns for close range. Sniper rifles work best at long range with aimed shots, same for autocannons at med range and machine guns with autofire at close range. Change weapon mode liberally depending of the situation as even the earth weapons are subject to availability as far as ammo goes.
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