Stuyvesant’s Unsung Heroes

In a world plagued by conflict, it may be difficult to remember and acknowledge the people who help to keep the peace. To remedy this issue, we interviewed three Stuyvesant alumni who made the choice to fight for their country by joining the military. These are their stories.

Zot Barazzotto

Zot Barazzotto graduated from Stuyvesant in 1962 and went on to attend the Rochester Institute of Technology. After graduating from RIT in 1966, Barazzotto went to Dayton, Ohio and started taking flying lessons. He explained, “I had already signed up for the navy, [but I] flunked the eye test because I had a little astigmatism. So they wouldn’t make me a pilot.” But on the day that he took the physical exam to join the air force, he passed it with 20/20 vision. Looking back, Barazzotto said, “I’m getting ready to get out of the chair, and the guy said, ‘You are pilot qualified—just barely, but you are pilot qualified.’”

Barazzotto fought in the Vietnam War from March of 1970 until March of 1971. His task was to make sure that the troops in North Vietnam were not cutting through Laos, a neutral area, in order to supply South Vietnam troops with ammunition, food, and arms. “My job was to be a traffic cop on the Ho Chi Minh trail—stopping the trucks bringing stuff back from North Vietnam.” The soldiers would do anything, including shooting, to enable the crossing of the arms and ammunition across the Ho Chi Minh trail. “I was a bullet magnet,” he said.

After fighting in Vietnam, Barazzotto continued flying; he flew over the Soviet Union, North Korea, and China in order to “keep track of the bad guys’” order of battle, he said; if you ever had to go to war with them, you knew what radars were where, what communications were where, what units were there, you kept track of the enemy order of battle.”

Barazzotto’s next major military actions occurred during the Cold War. The United States and Europe suspected that the Soviet Union was going to invade Europe. Barazzotto created a solution called the Offensive Defense in order to prevent them from doing so. When the United States were made to believe that the Soviet Union was crossing the borders, they would shoot drones into the streets. “The drones would go to an intersection in the village, and they would start blowing up stuff. Once you get it [traffic] stopped and you start blowing stuff up, you get chain reactions, and basically, a whole movement of this million-man army stops,” Barazzotto described. “You can stop the traffic on their side of the border without nuclear weapons, without chemical weapons, you can just jam it up with little drones.”

Although this idea would have succeeded in solving the problem, Barazzotto explained that the United States government did not want to use this idea because they did not feel comfortable with having unmanned vehicles. Barazzotto said, “They threw me out of the air force. If they don’t want to hear what you have to say, the answer is you’re gone. So, I was gone.” Afterwards, he stayed in the reserves for another 20 years.

Barazzotto explained that at Stuyvesant, even though he was not at the top of his class, it set him up for getting to college and beyond because of the high academic standards. Additionally, when at Stuyvesant, Barazzotto was still unsure what he wanted his future to look like; he had always been interested in flying, but was not sure if he wanted to go into the Air Force.

Barazzotto said that his experience in the military shaped his view on life and his outlook on the world in general. One of his mentors taught Barazzotto two things he continues doing today. “Number one, it is always easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission,” he said. Barazzotto explained that this lesson is important because if one goes through life asking for permission, then they will get rejected most of the time. But if one goes through life doing what they think is right, then the few times that they make a mistake, they can ask for forgiveness.

He recalled, “[My mentor] also said, ‘for every rule that says you can’t, there is one that says you can.’ Find the one that says you can, and when somebody says, ‘you can’t do that,’ you point to the one that says you can, and say, ‘right here, it says I can.’” Borazzotto backed this up with the fact that if one is successful, then nobody can tell them that they made a mistake. Essentially, Borazzato concluded with, “My answer to life is ‘Just Do it’—like the Nike commercial.”

Joseph Pearlman

Joseph Pearlman (‘57) served in the military in the same era as Barazzotto, but he had drastically different experiences. Pearlman grew up in a lower-class family who needed him to be working throughout high school. So, Pearlman went through Stuyvesant with a job, and from then on, he went to Brooklyn College. There, he majored in history and was in the Air Force Reserves Training Corps (AFROTC) which he signed up for immediately. Pearlman had known since he was a teenager that he wanted to go to the military, and this was a perfect chance for him.

After Pearlman graduated from Brooklyn College in June of 1961, he was sworn in as a reserve officer. Pearlman remembered the first time he was called in for active duty: “I reported into Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina, and I was assigned as a ‘Combat Defense Force Officer’ which translates into an an Air Officer, but which means that I was security for nuclear armed aircrafts,” he said. “I became an operations officer, and in 10 and a half months, I was commanding that squadron in the Cuban missile crisis.” Pearlman helped combat the Cuban missile crisis when both the United States and the Soviet union pulled out all of their intermediate range missiles (the United States from Turkey and the Soviet Union from Cuba).

Pearlman was in the inactive reserves for 19 years. In these years, Pearlman served in the intelligence field in all areas. He explained that he served in analysis in both the human intelligence side and operational intelligence side. As an intelligence officer, he covered most of the Middle-East. He also served as political-military affairs officer in plans and policy, Middle East/Africa and Southwest Asia.

In the 1970s, Pearlman analyzed the debriefings of the United States air force pilots that were released from Vietnam. He described a problem while the fighters were getting out of the aircrafts and his solution: “When they ejected from their aircrafts, they were getting injured, and the reason was because the ejection handles were on the pilot’s hand on the right armrest and left armrest. What they did was when pilots eject today in other aircrafts they ball into the fetal position so that nothing is sticking out—they can’t get hurt. That was a thing that I contributed to in the design of the new aircraft.”

Pearlman explained that because of his family’s Jewish heritage, his parents were very reluctant to allow him to go to the military. Pearlman’s father grew up in a small Polish town with a large military presence that was highly anti-semitic. His childhood led Pearlman’s father to believe that everyone in the military was anti-semitic. Pearlman recalled, “And my father was really upset [about me going to the military] because he didn’t understand that the American military is not [anti-semitic].”

Not only did Pearlman not experience any anti-semitism in the military, but he was welcomed with open arms to the local temple near the base. Pearlman remembered, “In Gullsborrow, [where I was based], they had a Reform temple. I am well schooled in Judaism. I grew as an Orthodox Jew. I don’t practice that way today. I speak, read, and write Hebrew, and I can pray [the traditional Jewish prayers].”

Despite Pearlman’s long time in the military, Pearlman said that he felt that it did not have any effect on him or his outlook on life. Instead, Pearlman explained that the Exodus story from the Old Testament taught him the most important life lessons. He compared his father to the characters in Fiddler on the Roof: traditional Orthodox Jews. Pearlman compared himself to the generation of Jews that were not born in Egypt (“the desert generation,” in Hebrew), rather than the people that were freed from Egypt. He remembered, “I compare myself to the new generation of Joshua and Caleb [two members of the new generation] because I was born in America. My father had no idea [about the nature of the US military]. He never really was fully Americanized. He was still the Fiddler on the Roof guy.”

Ed McGovern

Ed McGovern (‘85), a veteran from Sunnyside, Queens, attended Stuyvesant from 1981 to 1985, faithfully taking three trains each day to attend school. He remembered the disparities between his old Catholic school and Stuyvesant being immense, especially regarding style: “When I arrived as a freshman, there was clearly a hippie/Led Zeppelin/flower child vibe among a few of the students. People wore painted denim jackets with bands on the back, wallets on chains, sandals, concert t-shirts.”

McGovern was also a Pegleg—he played football on the school’s team for three years. At the time, the team had one of the worst records in the city and only began to improve with the arrival of Eugene Blaufarb as head coach. He recalled walking in his football gear to a practice field separate from the school in freezing weather conditions. McGovern believes that the conditioning and tough practices he underwent during that time prepared him for the military; “I actually think football prepared me well for the tough physical training at the Naval Academy. It also taught me how to deal with hardship and limited resources.”

It was a fellow football player, Pat Lacho, who first got McGovern interested in joining the military. His competitive attitude came into play when Lacho told him he was going to school for free. He asked about this school and asked what its rival school was. It took him 10 minutes to decide that he would go to the latter and graduate from there. This school was the Naval Academy.

As he was going through the applications process for the Naval Academy, he decided to join the Navy no matter what. He talked about the school with respect when discussing the difference between his expectations and reality. “I actually thought going to Navy would be a nice break and more of a well rounded challenge after Stuyvesant, which was a rigorous academic school. I was wrong,” McGovern recalled. “You carry a heavy workload in addition to going through a very challenging first year, and you are required to play sports. You are also competing with some incredibly bright and well rounded people, and no one can leave during the week. And, when I was there, there was no radio, cell phone, iPad, TV,” he said. He recalled that due to these rigorous conditions, one-third of his class dropped out.

The military has given McGovern a valuable abundance of insight and opportunities; he spoke very highly of his experience. “No one cares who you are or what your pedigree was before you got there—just if you are capable and a good leader,” he said. “You develop a lot of empathy and learn to relate to people from all over the country and from different economic backgrounds, something that seems to be lost more and more in the U.S. as people segregate themselves by school, career, political, and socio-economic background.” All of his work interactions required people to respect and earn respect from their peers, and these, in turn, taught McGovern how to be a great leader.

When asked about his choice to serve and how his experience at Stuyvesant affected that choice, he shed light on the diversity of the school: “I met a really broad swath of people from the far reaches of Staten Island, to the Bronx, and out to the end of Queens. It gave me a great excuse to explore the city and see how others lived. That sense of adventure never left me and was one of the reasons going into the Navy appealed to me.”

Through their experiences at Stuyvesant and the military, these veterans have collectively experienced and endured so much. Barazzoto stood up for his own values while learning about the crucial principles of forgiveness and determination. Pearlman served to make use of his time in the military with new innovations. McGovern came face to face with the task of learning about resilience and leadership in a diversified, demanding environment. The differing events within these veterans’ lives contributes to a better understanding of our lives and sheds light on the bright future they have helped to shape for us.