All living things are hardwired to survive. Whether it is human beings, orangutans, mice, carp, or bacteria, nothing wants to die. In fact, most normal folk will go to great lengths to keep breathing. That typically means reflexively taking cover or fleeing in the face of imminent danger. However, those innate urges can be circumvented. The natural drive to flee peril can be short-circuited by such fulminant stuff as love, envy, fear, exhaustion, or rage. David Bellavia didn’t flee.
The associated stress hormones are adequate to drive many a young medical student to distraction. Though it has been a minute since I studied such things in earnest myself, my singular recollection was that it was all ridiculously complicated and often counterintuitive. However, in a chaotic military environment, the practical result of this complex milieu can indeed be a wonder to behold.
The Origins of the Berserker
It’s hard being the youngest of four boys. Such an upbringing tends to make a man-child robust and resilient. In the case of David Bellavia, spending his formative years at the bottom of the familial dog pile was great preparation for the travails to come.
Bellavia’s dad was a dentist in western New York. Following High School graduation, David studied biology and theater at the University of Buffalo. His dad wanted him to go to dental school. However, David felt led in a different direction. In 1999, the young man enlisted in the US Army as a grunt.
The Big Green Machine
Along the way, Bellavia started a family. His infant son had some medical challenges, and the Army tried to accommodate. However, that eventually led to some hard decisions. Bellavia could change his MOS to something easier, accept a hardship discharge, or keep living the grunt life despite a pending 36-month tour in Germany away from his family. Following the egregious terrorist attacks of 911, Bellavia opted to head downrange as a ground pounder.
In the summer of 2003, Bellavia deployed to Kosovo and from there, directly to Iraq. For a year from 2004 through 2005, Bellavia fought in the Diyala Province along the Iranian border. This ultimately led him to Fallujah, one of the most sucktastic places on earth.
Operation Phantom Fury
The operation was appropriately titled Phantom Fury, and it was an old-school scrap. Most of the population of Fallujah had wisely gone elsewhere, leaving several thousand hard-core fanatics dug in deep. These true believers had excavated tunnels, emplaced IEDs, and transformed previously peaceful neighborhoods into killing zones. SSG Bellavia and his mates were tasked with ridding the place of them. To do so, the grunts of Company A, Task Force 2-2, 1st Infantry Division, called upon the big guns.
Relative to good old-fashioned American meat, ammo is cheap. The standard approach to clearing a hostile occupied dwelling was to crank the party with a 120mm high explosive round from an M1 tank through the front door. This was typically followed by a liberal dusting with 25mm rounds from the chain gun on a supporting Bradley. Once the building was well and truly pulverized, American grunts would dismount to mop up what was left. However, in one case, the 10th structure of 12 on a given block, there were friendlies behind the target building that negated the option of exercising the tank gun. Additionally, as luck would have it, the Bradley’s primary armament was down. SSG Bellavia and his buddies would have to crack this nut the old-fashioned way.
Translating the Chaos
Please be patient with me here. What followed was unimaginably chaotic. I have used several sources to try to piece together the narrative. However, if you were there and I missed some of the details, it certainly wasn’t intentional.
SSG Colin Fitts had already been shot three times during this deployment, yet he doggedly refused to be medevac’d back to the World. Gathering up his entry team, Fitts hit the building just as he had done many times before. SSG Bellavia was in the stack.
Things Go Sideways for David Bellavia
A well-trained entry team can clear a structure with a ballerina’s grace. These Big Red One grunts had done this enough to get good at it. However, once Fitts’ team passed the foyer and crossed the living room, enemy insurgents opened up with a pair of well-sited machineguns.
From studying the images, it looks like these were probably RPKs. On the receiving end, automatic weapons are horrifying enough out in the open. When unlimbered within a confined space, the chaos is reliably overwhelming. What had begun as a well-choreographed entry soon degenerated into a desperate fight for survival. The entire squad was trapped.
Counting the Carnage
SSG Bellavia’s M4 carbine had taken an enemy round and was out of the fight. Bellavia grabbed a nearby M249 SAW, moved into the line of fire, and torqued down on the trigger, slathering the enemy machinegun positions with a blistering hail of bullets. Four seconds later, the 200-round box on the M249 was empty, and the enemy weapons were momentarily silenced. Bellavia and his buddies used the distraction to beat feet.
The insurgents were still raining small arms fire down on his exposed position. At this point, normal people might have crawled back into the Bradley or just headed home to fight another day. However, SSG Bellavia had seen the faces of the terrorists inside the building and recognized their determination. For this, he felt they should all likely die.
Bellavia – Take 2
SSG Bellavia scrounged up a Bradley with a working gun and had it soften up the building for him. With SSG Scot Lawson as his sole backup, Bellavia grabbed a fresh M4 with an M203 grenade launcher and headed back inside. What he found was a vision from hell.
The chain gun had ruptured the sewer system, so the entire house was thoroughly befouled with slimy sewage. Additionally, it was now eerily dark with shards of broken mirrors everywhere that played havoc with the two men’s NVGs. Bellavia’s first glimpse of the enemy was of an insurgent peering through a hole in the wall. Bellavia reflexively triggered a 40mm grenade, which passed through the ventilated room and an open door to explode harmlessly behind the house. Now seeing the enemy soldier fumbling with an RPG, the energized grunt shoved the muzzle of his rifle through the opening and pumped rounds into the guy until he was done.
Now That Was Weird
A second insurgent then ran past, and Bellavia shot him. However, by now, things were getting muddled, and he had become separated from SSG Lawson. Turning in response to an unexpected noise, Bellavia found himself face-to-face with Michael Ware, an embedded reporter for Time Magazine. The only person crazier than the two American grunts who charged into a building full of insurgents just because they were mad had to have been the unarmed reporter who voluntarily followed them.
Suddenly surprised by another insurgent running down the stairs, SSG Bellavia found his angle and gunned the man down through a gap in a doorway. Bellavia then moved into an adjoining room to find a free-standing wardrobe. The big wooden box fell over and burst open, surprising Bellavia with yet another tooled-up fanatic who had been hiding inside. As the terrorist blindly fired his Kalashnikov carbine, SSG Bellavia winged him with his M4. Sprinting upstairs after the man, Bellavia announced his presence with an M67 frag grenade.
Bursting into the next room, Bellavia now came face-to-face with one seriously unhinged lunatic. The man began shouting in Arabic for his terrorist buddies to join him. Then it was truly game on.
Bellavia and The Sordid Reality of Hand-to-Hand Combat
What happened next was breathtaking in its ferocity. SSG Bellavia pounced upon the man and covered his mouth to get him to shut up. Bellavia later said that, “His breath was horrible, just stale, nasty breath.” At such intimate quarters, the flailing man bit him on the thumb through his glove. In desperation, Bellavia yanked out the SAPI plate from his body armor and began beating the guy with it.
There was no grace to any of this. In Bellavia’s words, “He’s screaming, there are people screaming downstairs, and I have no composure at all. This is not a John Rambo moment. I’m really scared.”
Well, Snap, Bellavia…
Bellavia got the man on the ground and began groping for his folding knife. Meanwhile, no kidding, this freaking maniac of a radical Islamist terrorist twisted around and bit Bellavia in the balls. In his words, “I stand up and he digs into my leg with his fingers. I’m looking for my Rex Applegate Gerber knife: not a multi-tool, just a serious blade. I go to reach for it and he puts his teeth — I don’t wear underwear and he bites me right in the genital region.” That’s when Bellavia finally got his knife open.
Amidst the flailing chaos, SSG Bellavia nearly cut his own pinkie finger off. However, he ultimately found his angle and stabbed the man in the throat, precipitating a predictably horrific mess. Once the insurgent was finally down, SSG Bellavia was understandably spent. This seemed a decent time for a smoke break.
Bellavia went out on a nearby balcony, removed his helmet, put down his weapon, and collapsed. Before he could get to his cigarette, a fifth insurgent leapt from the nearby third floor onto his second-floor landing, sprawling right in front of him. The force of the landing caused the terrorist to drop his AK. Both men scrambled for their rifles, but Bellavia was faster. He emptied his magazine into the guy at contact range, blowing him backwards off the building. If you’re counting, that was number five. Bellavia’s mates arrived moments later to secure the situation.
The War Machine
Afterwards, SSG Bellavia said, “Honestly, if I had an MRE spoon, I would have used it…My breaking point was the last guy. If my guys didn’t come in at that moment, I did not have enough reserve … I was just done.”
In the face of such terrific violence, SSG David Bellavia simply got angry. By my assessment, he fought with a rifle, a grenade launcher, a machinegun, a piece of body armor, his hands, and a folding knife. His extraordinary actions made him the first living recipient of the Medal of Honor from the Iraq War.
READ MORE HERE: Dr Dabbs – LT Stephen Peck: Nature versus Nurture
SSG David Bellavia – Denouement
SSG David Bellavia left the Army in 2005. Michael Ware’s imagery from the event made Bellavia’s only the second Medal of Honor action ever to have been filmed. The other was John Chapman during Operation Anaconda. Today, David Bellavia lives in western New York with his wife and three children. When things went a little nuts one November day back in 2004 in Fallujah, SSG David Bellavia briefly unlimbered his inner monster.
David Bellavia is a truly great American. If you’ve got 22 minutes handy and want to hear something powerfully moving, check this out–https://www.reddit.com/r/army/comments/c7631s/if_you_havent_yet_heard_ssg_bellaviaa_moh_speech/
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