Staff Sergeant, U.S. Army — War on Terror
David Gregory Bellavia was born November 10, 1975, in Buffalo, New York, and raised in western New York. A 1994 Lyndonville High School graduate, he studied at the University of Buffalo before enlisting in the U.S. Army in July 1999. After serving in Kosovo, he deployed to Iraq with the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division — the “Ramrods” — as a squad leader in 3rd Platoon, A Company, Task Force 2-2. After the September 11th attacks he chose to stay in uniform and fight.
On November 10, 2004 — his 29th birthday — during Operation Phantom Fury, Bellavia’s platoon was clearing a block of twelve buildings from which insurgents were firing on American forces. At the tenth house, a squad from his platoon became trapped in a room by intense fire from a fortified position under the stairs. With complete disregard for his own safety, Bellavia seized an automatic weapon and entered the doorway, firing at a cyclic rate so his pinned-down soldiers could break contact and escape. He re-entered and killed an insurgent preparing to launch a rocket-propelled grenade at his platoon, then cleared a darkened room, eliminating two more fighters. Pursued upstairs, he traded gunfire with another insurgent emerging from a closet and eliminated him, then wounded a fifth insurgent who had leapt onto the roof. He cleared the entire enemy-filled house alone — destroying four insurgents and badly wounding a fifth — saving three squads of his platoon.
His Silver Star was upgraded to the Medal of Honor, presented by President Donald Trump on June 25, 2019 — making him the first and only living Medal of Honor recipient from the Iraq War. Embedded journalist Michael Ware witnessed the fight, describing it in the November 22, 2004 Time cover story “Into the Hot Zone” and in his documentary Only the Dead. Bellavia left the Army with the rank of staff sergeant in 2005 and was inducted into the New York State Veterans Hall of Fame that year.
Since leaving service he wrote the memoir House to House (2007) with John R. Bruning, returned to Iraq as an embedded reporter in 2006 and 2008, co-founded the veterans advocacy group Vets for Freedom, hosted radio on WBEN in Buffalo, and founded the Deuce Deuce Relief Fund to support the soldiers of his former Task Force 2-2. He resides in western New York and has three children.
Sources: Wikipedia · Congressional Medal of Honor Society