‘ Madly in love’ couple planned to have kids

They were above all.

There was the usual clutter of Army deployment — assignments, frustrations and war — that > lled the pages of lined paper that Staff Sgt. Joseph P. Bellavia, 28, of Clarksville, Tenn., wrote in longhand to his wife, Christine. She was the “ Princess” in every salutation.

But almost out of nowhere in the narrative, Bellavia would suddenly write “ I love you,” as if everything else was just a distraction.

March 30, 2003: “ I can’t wait to see your beautiful face again. I miss you a lot.”

May 4: “ I showed the interpreters your pictures and they think you’re beautiful. I told them of course she’s beautiful. She’s my wife.”

June 30: “ I can’t be without you for another year. I can’t go through that again.”

On Oct. 2: “ I’m the luckiest man alive to have such a wonderful and beautiful woman as my wife, friend and supporter.”

Sometimes she would > nd an envelope in the mail with a piece of paper containing the phrase, “ I love you” and nothing else. “ Every breath that he took was for me, and every breath I took was for him,” Christine says. “ We

may have only been

married for three and

half years, but people

who are married for 30

years don’t have what

we had.”

“ He was madly in

love,” says his father, Joseph F. Bellavia.

His son was in a military police unit from

the 101st Airborne Division, working to provide security in the months after the successful invasion of Iraq when there was relative calm. That was before the emergence of a violent insurgency.

“I’m disgustingly skinny

and ugly,” Bellavia wrote to

his wife > ve months into his

deployment. “ Hell, I’d walk a

mile out of my way to avoid

a mirror. I don’t know how

you could be attracted to

me. I love you.”

On Oct. 16, during a tense

standoff with Shiite militia in

Karbala, > ring broke out. A

battalion commander, Lt.

Col. Kim Orlando, 43, of Tennessee, was fatally shot. As

Bellavia tried to provide covering > re for soldiers pulling

Orlando to safety, he was

struck by grenade shrapnel

and bullet rounds.

His death came a

months before he

scheduled to go home.

He and Christine were

childless. She had miscarried a baby two weeks after

Joe deployed to Iraq and sent him an image from the ultrasound, which he conceded in his letters was dif > cult to see. “ It really depressed me,” he wrote. But Bellavia remained eternally optimistic.

“ Now I knowwhat I have to look forward to when I get home. We will be pregnant again. I reallywant to father your children. When I get home, I want us to go on a vacation, for us to spend time together and keep the sparks C ying. I justwanna make you happy any way possible. I love you so much. Well, I must get back to the soldiers . . .

Love Always,

Joe” few was

By Christopher Berkey, AP