A member of the 1st Infantry Division attempts to kick down the door of a gateway near the streets of Fallujah. As a child, Bellavia dreamed of bravely defending his country in the infantry. Papa Joe, a radio operator during World War II, had told him harrowing stories of war since Bellavia’s childhood in Waterport, a rural farming town of 1,000 residents, just south of the Lake Ontario shoreline. He stood motionless as the men ransacked his family’s home.įor much of his 22 years, he had talked about enlisting in the Army - joining the ranks that his grandfather, Joseph Brunacini, had so proudly served. In that instance, Bellavia realized he didn’t have the courage to defend his family. “I’m going to blast these guys, but I don’t want to hurt them. “I was afraid to kill them,” Bellavia said. With his finger on the trigger, he imagined the moment after he fired his weapon - blood spilling across the wooden flooring, and the men’s lifeless bodies sprawled in his living room. “They didn’t see me as a threat,” Bellavia remembered, recounting the 1998 robbery. Bellavia, the next Medal of Honor recipient, faced one of the toughest fights of his life when insurgents ambushed his unit in the tenth house. David Bellavia and his teammates looked through nine homes for insurgents with ties to al-Qaeda jihadist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Members of Task Force 2-2, 1st Infantry Division search a house in Fallujah during the early days of Operation Phantom Fury in 2004. They looked at him - all 5 feet, 11 inches of him, and smirked. Terrified, Bellavia aproached the shirtless intruders, who stood, seemingly willing to shoot him. The men who stood before him seemed in a daze, stumbling and buzzed.īellavia, home on break from college, had been burning trash in the backyard, when a beaten, patchwork-framed car screeched to a halt at his family’s sprawling ranch-style home, which sat in a rural swath of sparsely-populated upstate New York. Knowing no one by that name lived there, Bellavia went into the basement to retrieve the firearm, as the intruders began cutting cables to his parents’ TV. His mother, still recovering from spine surgery, lay asleep with his father in the master bedroom as two armed men had walked into the house. If he failed to act, he and his family could die. He held the Remington 870 shotgun - chambered and ready to fire.

Operation phantom fury gun