10/16/2026
November 10, 2004 was David Bellavia’s 29th birthday. It was also the third day of the Second Battle of Fallujah, and his squad had been given 12 houses to clear that night.
The first 9 were empty.
In the 10th, insurgents were waiting in a room under the stairs with machine g*ns. They opened up on the squad in the dark, and Bellavia’s men were pinned in a house with one way out.
He picked up an M249, stepped into the fire, and laid down enough of it for them to get out.
Then he went back in on his own.
He cleared the house room by room. The citation credits him with k*lling 4 insurgents and badly wounding a 5th.
At one point he ran out of am******on and ended up fighting hand to hand with a kn*fe. He came out bl**ding and wounded.
A reporter named Michael Ware, embedded with the unit for Time, was there and filmed part of it. It ran on the cover of Time that month.
Bellavia was given the Silver Star. He left the Army in 2005 and wrote a book about that night called House to House.
15 years later the award was upgraded. On June 25, 2019 he received the Medal of Honor at the White House, the first living Iraq War veteran to get one.
32 men from his unit came, including 12 who had been in Fallujah with him that night. The families of 5 soldiers they lost came too.
He told reporters afterward that the whole thing was impossible to think about except in terms of the men they didn’t bring home.
Because of Ware’s footage, he is the only living recipient whose Medal of Honor action exists on video.
