Ewing native Jamie Mucciarelli, center, with crew members during her time in the U.S. Air Force, where she worked with other soldiers on mental health issues before becoming a loadmaster for a C-130 transport plane.
By Madeleine Maccar
Standstill traffic usually offers little else but unchanging scenery and wasted time, but for Jamie Mucciarelli, it was an unexpected catalyst for the global travels that would come to punctuate her 12-year career in the Air Force.
In 1993, when the newly minted Mercer County Community College graduate was returning her rented cap and gown to her alma mater, a busted traffic light rerouted her journey. Back then, she couldn’t just whip out an iPhone to let her mother know she’d be late getting the family car home, so she pulled into a shopping center to use the first office phone she could find, which turned out to be in a military recruitment office.
Mucciarelli didn’t realize it at the time, but that chance stop would change the course of her life, and eventually put her on a path to travel around the world and to eventually return to Ewing armed with knowledge, life experience and a desire to help give back to the community.
“There was an army guy in a green uniform who was on the phone, and an Air Force guy in a blue one who was able to talk to me,” she said. “It was entirely by happenstance.”
With an iron-worker dad, a stay-at-home mom, and no firsthand experience with the military at the time, Mucciarelli said that she “wouldn’t know the difference between an Air Force uniform and an army one if I tripped over it” and was shocked to find out that her recently acquired associate’s degree had a place in the service as a springboard for a mental-health technician career.
After perusing a few brochures and learning that her education would automatically put her at a higher pay scale and a higher rank, the Ewing native was sold. Almost three weeks later, she was on a plane to San Antonio to begin training for the Air Force.
Far from being a life-changing decision made on a whim, seizing the chance to broaden her horizons both culturally and geographically is the inevitable culmination of a childhood highlighted by making pen pals from around the country on every family vacation, poring over the World Book Encyclopedia cover to cover, and an incurable case of wanderlust.
“I always needed to be going somewhere,” Mucciarelli said. “It felt like there were so many things I wanted to see.”
She has since been all over the United States and was deployed to a slew of Southeast Asian countries, serving in her first in the area of mental-health and then later retraining to become a C-130 load master who was responsible for cargo and passengers, computing the center of gravity for takeoffs and landings, and opening the craft’s doors so jumpers could descend into combat. She has also earned one master’s degree in human resources and another in clinical social work.
But after seeing the world and serving her country, Mucciarelli returned to Ewing in September 2014 and is looking to give back to the veterans in her hometown community, welcoming any help in both reaching out to and getting in touch with area veterans who might benefit from her services.
“I’m trying to market myself to say that I don’t have all the answers but I want to be able to identify veterans, be able to have that kind of rapport with them, and thank them for their service—but I also want to reach people who aren’t necessarily near VA centers here in Ewing to be aware of what services are available to them,” she said. “I’m working on establishing a free space where I can hold process groups and support groups and I can bring pamphlets of information about services that are offered at the VA.”
Mucciarelli now works at the VA hospital in East Orange. She serves as a Primary Care-Mental Health Integration Therapist there, helping veterans identify any mental-health red flags and adjust to life outside the service, as well as “normalize” any changes to their personalities that are the tangible aftermath of a military career, in the hopes that their loved ones can better understand those lasting effects.
“I’ll be talking to family members who don’t understand why their spouse won’t go to a restaurant unless they can get the table in the corner,” she said. “So I tell them that’s not being crazy, that’s just a preference now. And then I transition into talking about trust and the need to protect the family, how they want to be able to sit in a certain spot as a way to protect people.”
Mucciarelli is hoping her occupational talents will benefit Ewing’s veteran community by offering her assistance to those who have served, an outreach effort she has undertaken on her own time. What began years ago as carving her own niche in the civilian world by using her background to help others successfully make that same transition has since turned into devoting her free time to assisting veterans as they adjust to life after the military.
“It just started off by helping a couple of acquaintances, people I knew through friends,” Mucciarelli said. “I was helping them get their resumes together, and it just really started expanding through word of mouth. Now I have an email address where people can write to me, I’m building a website, and maybe some day I’ll have the time or the energy to really go full-blown nonprofit but, right now, what I’m doing seems to serve those who need it.”
Being involved in both the military and mental health communities alike has given Mucciarelli a unique perspective, imbuing her with a genuine empathy that resonates with the veterans she helps and an inexhaustible enthusiasm for her work. Dr. Gayla Paschall, for whom Mucciarelli worked as a project coordinator at the VA in Little Rock, Ark., said that Mucciarelli was hired to work with the project’s schizophrenic and bipolar clients “for a lot of reasons but primarily because I felt that she was best suited for the population we’d be working with.”
“When this position opened, it piqued her interest to work with seriously mentally ill veterans,” Paschall said, adding that Mucciarelli’s dedication to and thoroughness in her role were two of her biggest assets—and a comfort. “During the study, I broke my leg and I could not drive to work for three weeks. Jamie handled everything. She kept things going so I never worried—in fact, I texted her from the ER saying, ‘I think I broke my leg. You’re on tomorrow.’ She always wanted to learn more and always seemed to be the most capable, the most organized, and the most enthusiastic person.”
If the Mucciarelli surname sounds familiar, it might be because she herself is active on social media in her veteran outreach efforts, and her younger brother is Justin “Mooch” Mucciarelli, the softball superstar with a pitching style all his own. Mucciarelli said that she and her brother are currently enjoying a sibling bond that “is the strongest and best it’s ever been,” a testament to the warmth that she said has always been the hallmark of her family.
“I have so many good memories here: I think back to what it was like growing up, and my parents were always hugging and kissing each other, always busting each other’s chops,” Mucciarelli said. “I learned at a young age the way that a healthy, happy family operates.”
It is that loving family she credits for introducing her to the template for effective communication skills and a healthy respect for not taking life too seriously.
“My parents are two great role models,” she said. “They’re why I feel like I have that gift of gab, they’re why I can reach people—they taught me nothing has to be that serious. There’s a time and place for humor, there’s a time and a place for sarcasm, and there’s a time and a place to shut up and let someone just tell you their story.”
And letting people tell her their stories as a way of reaching out to them is a big part of why Mucciarelli is eager to get her name out there as an additional resource available to local veterans, a position that benefits her as much as those she works with.
“I just love it,” she said. “It’s so rewarding and humbling. I get a little teary talking about it because I can’t get emotional with them. It just makes me feel really good that I’m not wasting the talents I’ve been given.”
Any veterans interested in seeking Mucciarelli’s assistance can reach her at promotingvets@gmail.com.
,
