It began as a mission to save Saleh Khalaf, a 9-year-old Iraqi boy severely maimed in an explosion. It became much more - a journey of inspiring courage, medical triumphs, unforeseen tragedies and small miracles.

Dr. Jay Johannigman opened the back door of the Iraqi ambulance. Inside was a boy. His abdomen was ripped open. His left eye was missing. Both hands -- blown off.

A veteran of two Gulf wars, the surgeon at Tallil Air Base near Nasiriya had seen casualties this horrific many times. Few survived. Remarkably, this child was still speaking.

"Mister, I need water," 9-year-old Saleh Khalaf said politely in Arabic.

It was Oct. 18, 2003, seven months after U.S. forces invaded Saleh's country as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Johannigman knew that his job was to treat only American soldiers, but Saleh's unwillingness to die moved him.

The Air Force doctor made a split-second decision that would launch a dramatic mercy mission. The rescue operation would involve an airlift from Iraq to the Bay Area, require dozens of life-and-death surgeries and attract worldwide media coverage.

No one could have imagined then that the mission would take so many harrowing turns -- or alter so many lives.

The effort to save Saleh would imperil his family. It would force him to endure excruciating physical and emotional pain. It would strand him in a strange land, far from his remote Muslim fishing village.

Yet before it was over, ordinary people would become heroes. And a little boy from a battle-scarred land would show everyone he met that even in the wreckage of war, there could be miracles.

Saleh's 16-year-old brother, Dia, was up to his usual tricks, switching their conservative uncle's Quran TV station to a channel with dance music.

The younger Saleh was too modest to join the prank, but he giggled anyway. He didn't have all the dance moves like Dia, who wore his hair shaved on the sides and long on the top -- just like the American boys.

Their father, Raheem, sometimes couldn't believe his two sons were brothers. Saleh was always reading the Quran, and Raheem could silence him by simply putting a finger to his lips. Dia had a mind of his own. In the family's southern Iraqi village of Bada'a, he spent his time hanging out with friends.

Too reckless, said an aunt, to marry her teenage daughter. That morning, on Oct. 10, the adults in the living room were giving serious thought to a wedding between the youths when Dia interrupted them with his rendition of the Macarena.

Raheem shook his head, but he had to smile. It had been a long time since he had laughed so freely with his relatives.

The family had been much happier in the months since the American bombings sent longtime dictator Saddam Hussein and many of his Sunni Muslim followers into hiding. For the first time in a generation, the oppressed Shiite Muslim peasants in Saleh's village imagined a future without mass graves and whispered fears. Many Shiite men in the rundown village of 300 had lost homes to bulldozers, or their ears to the secret police, for defying the Baghdad regime.

After a seven-month absence from the classroom, Saleh and Dia were to return to school later that morning. Allied forces had recently driven out fugitive Sunni militants holed up in the boys' school. U.S. soldiers had checked the grounds for explosives and assured parents that students could safely go back.

Saleh was looking forward to class. An expert Lego builder who liked to draw, he had the makings of an architect, his parents and teachers thought.

Raheem, a taxi driver, took his sons to school. On the way, he gave them a rare treat and stopped for gyros. Dia ate two.

When Raheem dropped the boys off, Dia yelled back over his shoulder that this had been the happiest day of his life. Raheem cringed.

In Arabic culture, it was bad luck to say that.

Returning home from school later that day on a barren path, Saleh trotted behind the longer stride of Dia.

They were getting close to an abandoned restaurant, the halfway point on their 2-mile walk to their crumbling mud and concrete house.

Saleh stopped. Something caught his eye in the trench alongside the road. It was a khaki-colored ball, small and smooth -- a toy perfect for playing catch with Dia.

Saleh's parents had warned him not to touch strange objects on the ground. But he was still caught up in the giddiness of seeing his schoolmates again.

Saleh picked up the object, and quickly realized his mistake when a classmate ran away.

He looked down at his hands and began to cry. Dia raced toward him. Just three more steps.

It blew.

Raheem was washing his taxi in the front yard when he heard some kind of explosion. It was such a common sound: It could have been mortar fire, or someone's can of cooking oil. The 35-year-old man with ink-black hair barely looked up.

To celebrate their sons' first day back in class, his wife, Hadia, had splurged for an expensive freshwater fish called bini, which she was preparing over a fire in the backyard. She and her husband had always expected great things from their sons in school, and she wanted to reinforce that returning to class was cause for celebration.

Suddenly, a screaming child ran to the house and interrupted their chores: "Dia and Saleh are dead!"

Raheem dropped his cleaning rag. Chickens and ducks scattered out of his way as he ran for a mile down the dirt road. Hadia trailed far behind, stumbling with grief as villagers crowded around her.

Raheem crossed over the lock where ships used to come in from the Diyala River, past the shuttered restaurant and toward his sons' school.

Raheem's slippers fell off. His bare feet began to bleed, but he ignored the pain. He screamed and screamed. He couldn't stop.

Until he saw Saleh.

Lying sprawled on his back, Saleh was motionless, his belly torn open. His right hand was gone, and only a thumb and an inch of his middle finger remained on his left. Blood poured from his eyes. A piece of shrapnel the size of a quarter had torn through his left eye and lodged in his brain behind his right eye.

Raheem thought Saleh was dead.

Dia was trying to get up. Much of his right thigh was missing. A piece of shrapnel had lodged in his neck.

"There's nothing wrong with me," Dia told his father.

Raheem held Dia so tightly that his friends had to fight to get the teenager out of his arms and into a friend's car. As Raheem climbed in the backseat, Dia said: "Dad, really, I'm all right."

Raheem embraced his first son and prayed. Shortly after they arrived at Saddam Hussein Hospital in Nasiriya, Dia bled to death.

Raheem selected a coffin for Dia at the hospital's morgue. He and a friend immediately set off in a rental car for the 250-mile journey to the holy city of Najaf, where he would bury Dia that same night, as is Muslim custom. They leased a Chevy Suburban so they could fit the wooden box holding Dia in the back.

Raheem would have to attend Dia's funeral without Hadia. In a small Muslim village like theirs, women weren't allowed at funerals. He was desperate for an update from his brothers, who he thought were making burial plans for Saleh. But without phone service, he couldn't contact them or Hadia.

During Dia's service, Raheem helped hold the coffin aloft and circled the tomb of Imam Ali, the holiest leader of the Shiites. A day spent with Imam Ali is said to be worth 700 years of prayer, and Shiites from around the world seek to bury their loved ones in the same cemetery.

"There is no God but Allah," Raheem chanted in Arabic, "and prophet Muhammad is his messenger."

Even though he said the words, Raheem was questioning why Allah had taken his two sons.

Moments before the burial, Raheem and a village elder went to a ceremonial room at the cemetery and bathed Dia with a sponge and soap. They perfumed him and wrapped him in cloth, like a cocoon. Normally, the dead were buried in one shroud. Raheem insisted on eight pieces of fabric because he thought Dia deserved it.

When he arrived back home that night, he went straight to the "sympathy house," where townspeople were chanting Quranic verses to escort Dia's soul to paradise.

Then someone -- Raheem can't remember who -- told him Saleh was still alive.

Raheem could feel his knees give out. He collapsed.

Minutes later, an overjoyed Raheem raced in his taxi to Saddam Hussein Hospital in Nasiriya.

When he entered Saleh's room, he found Hadia praying. When he saw his father, Saleh whispered, "Please, please, can I have some water?"

Raheem couldn't believe how pale Saleh's olive skin had turned. His only living son was all bones.

In the hospital hallway, out of Saleh's earshot, Hadia cried as Raheem described Dia's funeral. She then told him what had happened to Saleh earlier that morning.

Just after Raheem had taken a dying Dia to the hospital, Hadia had arrived at the blast scene to find Saleh on the ground. Realizing that her son was alive, she put Saleh's intestines back in his abdomen and held his body together with her skirt.

Hadia could hear the moans of her son and see his intestines shaking during the car ride to the closest hospital, 10 miles away in Al Shatra. But doctors were short on supplies. Without any large bandages, the only thing they could do was to cover Saleh's abdominal wound with plaster, then send him immediately to the larger Saddam Hussein Hospital in Nasiriya, 40 miles away.

Over the next three days, the Nasiriya doctors stitched his organs back together and put simple bandages over Saleh's mangled forearms.

As the week wore on, Raheem grew increasingly worried. There were no medications. The hospital, abandoned during the American bombings, looked dirty and empty to him. The surgeons would leave the orderlies in charge a lot, especially at night.

Nurses privately confirmed Raheem's worst fears: The doctors were waiting to see whether Saleh would die before operating.

Looking for answers, Raheem tracked down Saleh's physician at another clinic.

"Sit down," the doctor said.

Raheem refused. "I already lost my oldest son. I am here to get the truth about this one."

The doctor lowered his head.

"Your son is 100 percent in danger," he said. "Your only shot -- and it's a long one -- is to go to the Americans."

The next day, Oct. 18, Raheem drove to the U.S. checkpoint of Tallil Air Base. Armed with the only word he knew in English, he spoke to the jittery guards:

"Mister, mister."

The guards, trained to expect suicide bombers, fanned out in a circle around Raheem, guns at the ready. Shouting in broken Arabic and using hand gestures, they ordered Raheem to stop, raise his hands and spread his legs.

After determining he was free of dynamite and guns, the guards looked at him blankly.

"Mister, mister," Raheem tried again.

Raheem panicked. Shouting in Arabic, he asked to see the general, but no one understood him. The only chance to save his son was about to vanish.

Then Allah delivered Raheem a gift.

One of the interpreters called to the checkpoint was an Iraqi friend who had frequented Raheem's favorite cafe to drink coffee and smoke fruit tobacco through hookah pipes. Raheem couldn't believe his luck.

His friend, Abdel Hassan, asked what was going on.

The story came out in chokes and sobs. Once the Americans got the translation, one of the guards stepped forward and put his hand on Raheem's shoulder.

Now, they understood. The guards told the translator to tell Raheem that they would call an ambulance for Saleh.

When Johannigman first saw Saleh in the back of the ambulance, Raheem was waving flies off of his son's wounds.

That Saleh was awake and talking contradicted every textbook the physician had ever read.

The bone on the boy's right arm was exposed where his hand had been blown off. Johannigman pulled the blanket back from Saleh and saw the clumsy plaster battle dressing covering his belly.

Johannigman immediately thought, "land mine." Allied forces were unearthing mines every week from schools, villages and even their own base.

The Iraqi doctors had concluded that Saleh's injuries came from an American-made cluster bomb that failed to detonate during the March invasion. Each one scattered 1,000 bomblets that Iraqi children had frequently mistaken for toys.

For Raheem, the origin of the blast did not matter -- his son was dying. He handed Johannigman the boy's medical record. It consisted of a small scrap of gray paper with a few notes in Arabic from Saddam Hussein Hospital.

Johannigman looked at the document. Useless.

It was now or never. Johannigman didn't have high hopes, but he hugged Raheem and headed for the trauma tent.

In a makeshift emergency room, Johannigman scrubbed his hands and prepared for surgery.

For several weeks, he had been working in a canvas-covered tent shaped like an airplane hangar. It was triage, all the time.

Johannigman, the trauma director at University Hospital in Cincinnati, was on his third tour of duty in the Persian Gulf as a reservist. The lieutenant colonel thrived under the intense conditions that the Air Force referred to as "austere but adequate," where creativity and quick thinking could mean the difference between a patient living and dying.

It was the type of work he dreamed of when he entered medical school -- no HMOs, no insurance forms.

The boyish 47-year-old had always believed that his mission was to save patients one at a time, whether it was a 23-year-old American staff sergeant who had rolled his humvee or a 9-year-old Iraqi boy who had picked up an explosive on his way home from school.

On the operating table, Saleh's pulse was fading.

Air Force doctors hooked him up to an IV and assessed the boy. Saleh screamed as they pried off his plaster bandage. His dressing hadn't been changed and had stuck to his wounds.

When Johannigman got the bandages off, he didn't think he could save Saleh. The stitches holding the boy's colon, stomach, liver and small intestine had burst apart with the swelling of his organs, and gangrene was spreading inside his abdomen.

In the next eight hours, doctors conducted 10 operations, during which they untangled Saleh's organs and put them back in their correct places, closed holes in his bowel and cleaned the infections. They pulled piece after piece of shrapnel out of his body. Doctors used a plastic IV bag to close Saleh's abdomen because he didn't have enough skin.

Saleh hung on. After every surgery, Johannigman would remove the breathing tube from Saleh's mouth, and the little boy would wake up, asking for something to eat. His resilience was like nothing the doctor had ever seen.

It was sunrise when Johannigman finally peeled off his scrubs and fell asleep in his cot. Within a few hours, nurses paged him. Saleh was throwing up blood.

In the trauma tent, Raheem called for help. Saleh heard the worry in his father's voice. "Don't cry, there's nothing wrong with me," he said. Raheem had heard that before.

"Don't let him die! Don't let him die!" Raheem shouted at the Air Force doctors through an interpreter. "Please, please, give him water!"

Johannigman thought one of the stitched holes in Saleh's stomach had broken loose. But that didn't account for his rapid pulse. He was slipping away.

The doctors couldn't give him water, because it could have entered his lungs and made him choke. "Get the chaplain, we may lose him this time," Johannigman called out.

Saleh went into shock. Six nurses, Johannigman and a second surgeon gathered with the Air Force chaplain around Saleh's bed.

"Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name ..."

Raheem didn't understand their prayer, but he saw the doctors with their heads bent down. He knew they thought his son was going to die.

Raheem did the only thing he could think to do. He joined the Americans, turning his palms toward the skies and praying to Allah.

But in the middle of the night, the bleeding somehow clotted and stopped. It strengthened Johannigman's belief that surgeons worked with God's hands.

Saleh had survived again, and Johannigman gave him a nickname.

Lion Heart.

From that night on, Johannigman slept in a cot next to Saleh.

Soldiers, medics and cooks all came by to visit the boy whose iron will and easy charm made him the talk of the dusty base. Saleh taught the nurses a few Arabic phrases: "Scratch my nose," and "Cover me."

An orthopedic surgeon was called in to saw off the bone that was sticking out of Saleh's right forearm, and pull good skin over the break so it could one day fit a prosthetic.

But by Oct. 25, a week after Saleh had arrived, Johannigman had a new problem that he hadn't anticipated.

His trauma tent wasn't equipped to rehabilitate Saleh. Normally, the Air Force hospital would stabilize wounded soldiers so they could be transported to the United States for long-term medical care. Now doctors had an Iraqi child who needed the same thing, but there was nowhere to send him.

Johannigman knew that his young patient had a realistic chance of surviving -- but not in the plundered clinics of Iraq, let alone a bare-bones base in the middle of the desert.

The Air Force surgeon turned to the Internet to consult with pediatric specialists in the United States.

Children's Hospital Oakland, the largest pediatric hospital in Northern California, heard about Saleh's plight on the Web, and administrators agreed to take Saleh as a patient -- for free. Of the thousands of injured children in Iraq, Saleh would become one of the lucky few singled out by American military doctors to be treated in the United States. The battle plan was straightforward: Airlift Saleh to Oakland. Restore his organs, give him a new right hand, and build an acrylic left eye. Then send him back home.

To help Saleh survive the airlift, a doctor from San Francisco General Hospital -- Peggy Knudson, whom Johannigman had consulted online -- shipped a biological dressing called wound vacuum-assisted closure, or "wound-vac." A thin, black spongy material used in cutting-edge trauma rooms, wound-vac sits on top of wounds and absorbs fluid while pulling the skin together slowly.

It arrived four days later in a DHL delivery van. The driver asked Johannigman: "Are you the doctor treating a boy named Saleh?"

In that moment, Johannigman felt proud to be from a country that had the resources and the will to help a boy from a faraway country.

In Saleh, Johannigman had found a piece of war-torn Iraq that he could save.

On Nov. 8 -- three weeks after they had frisked Raheem at gunpoint -- soldiers escorted Saleh and his father toward a C-130 military plane at Tallil Air Base. Neither Raheem nor Saleh had ever been in an airplane. Neither had ever heard of their destination: California.

The medical evacuation had been cleared by U.S. immigration officials and then approved by everyone from the base commander to the Iraqi Ministry of Health to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

In the dark of night, Air Force doctors gingerly lifted Saleh's cot into the camouflaged military plane. He was unconscious, on his side with his stick legs tucked under him. Barely 40 pounds, he looked like a bird that had fallen out of its nest.

On the tarmac, Johannigman prayed with Raheem again. This time, the doctor lifted his hands to the sky and prayed the way Raheem did.

Inside the plane, it was pitch black. Doctors showed Raheem where to sit, out of the way of injured American soldiers lying on stretchers.

Raheem was terrified by the thought of flying, and it was agonizing to leave behind Hadia and their two small daughters, Marwa, 2, and Zahara, 4. But he knew this was the only chance to save Saleh.

The pilot started the engine. Raheem bolted upright. The drone of the engine's propellers drowned out all sound, including Saleh's medical monitoring equipment.

During the flight, Saleh suffered chills, and his temperature shot up to 104. His lungs weren't functioning normally.

At stops to change planes in Kuwait, Germany, and Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, doctors on board ran into the terminals to e-mail Johannigman about Saleh's worsening condition.

After a 35-hour journey, the plane touched down at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield at about 1 a.m. Nov. 10. Saleh, still unconscious, was placed in a helicopter for the ride to Children's Hospital Oakland.

A hospital staff worker fetched Raheem in a company car. On the way, he was transfixed by the rolling landscape. The freeways. The office buildings. The SUVs. Everything seemed so big.

As the helicopter landed on the roof of Children's Hospital, chief pediatric surgeon James Betts was waiting with a 6,000-calorie-a-day IV filled with fat, protein and glucose. He knew from Internet chats with Johannigman that Saleh was starving and would need more strength before any more surgeries.

When Betts first saw Saleh, the boy was so emaciated that he looked more like a kindergartner than a 9-year-old. Betts inserted the IV in Saleh's arm and pulled a red blanket decorated with dalmatians over him.

The 56-year-old Betts would lead a team of doctors, plastic surgeons, physical therapists and counselors that would try to restore Saleh to health.

The moment Raheem arrived in Saleh's room, Betts could see the pain in his face. The doctor shook his hand, and through an interpreter, assured Raheem that he would do everything he could to get Saleh home.

It humbled Betts that a father would come so far, under such emotional duress, to seek his help. The tall, lanky surgeon was considered a Bay Area hero for climbing the rubble of the Cypress Freeway in Oakland hours after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake and amputating a boy's leg to pull him out. In another high-profile case, he treated a 10-year-old Richmond boy whose face and ears had been torn off by three pit bulls.

In the first few days, all Betts and his team could do was feed the unconscious Saleh intravenously and monitor his weight. Saleh was taken to the operating room multiple times so physicians could change his surgical dressings. They needed to wait until the dressings pulled his abdominal skin closer together, so that eventually they could use grafts from his thighs to close the wound. Saleh also would need skin grafts around the remaining thumb and partial finger on his left hand. An eye specialist cleaned out Saleh's damaged eye socket.

Betts' strategy worked. Saleh regained consciousness, and his temperature stabilized.

Saleh had cheated death one more time.

"I want to see Mom and my sisters. I want to see them before I die," Saleh moaned in Arabic.

On his fourth day in the intensive care unit, Saleh felt acute pain in his arms and abdomen and realized he was far from home. He was entering what pediatric surgeons call the depression phase. Betts, after 20 years of treating young gunshot victims, recognized it immediately.

"You're not going to die," Raheem told Saleh, sidestepping his son's request to go home. Raheem wasn't sure when they would see Hadia and the girls again.

Saleh had a white patch over his left eye socket. "I want to die!" "I want to die!"

"Shhhh, Shhhh," soothed Raheem. He put on rubber gloves and scratched around the edges of his son's abdominal wound.

Saleh was ready for his first meal. He asked the nurses whether they had a lamb's heart.

Armed with pictures of food on index cards, they suggested he pick something else.

He settled on french fries.

By mid-November, Saleh was in the news around the world. CNN, local TV stations and dozens of newspapers had reported the boy's airlift to the Bay Area.

Well-wishers sent Saleh piles of stuffed animals and toy cars. A Yemeni couple in Oakland, owners of a Middle Eastern market near the hospital, made daily treks with yogurt and rice. Muslim groups in Oakland and Marin collected nearly $4,000 in community donations for Raheem and Saleh. Arabic professors from UC Berkeley came by to console Raheem.

Schoolchildren made Saleh quilts and cards. Nurses brought balloons. Firefighters dropped by with a red hat and miniature fire truck.

Saleh was too weak to play with any of his gifts, and instead watched an Arabic cartoon videotape that the hospital provided.

Raheem sat in a chair next to his son during the day, always in the same brown, button-down shirt and knit vest that he had worn on the plane. At night, he crawled into bed with Saleh, forgoing the hospital apartment provided to him in the Family House two blocks away. He prayed five times a day facing east, unless there wasn't space in the emergency room for his prayer rug. Otherwise, Raheem recited his prayers in his head.

As Saleh had done at the Tallil Air Base, he charmed his nurses at Children's. A doctor's wife brought him the Quran on CD. A secretary brought him balloons shaped like dolphins.

His favorite American was 40-year-old Leslie Troutner, a ward clerk in the intensive care unit for more than a decade. Though she had seen many children at the hospital, she had managed not to get too attached to any one patient. But there was something about Saleh that defied words.

She began trying to communicate with gestures and an Arabic dictionary. Her broken Arabic was the only thing that could make Raheem laugh. She brought fast food to Saleh's bedside and taught him one of his first English expressions: "Burger King."

She had the same long, dark hair and chocolate eyes as Saleh's mother.

One evening in the last week of November, Raheem bent down to pray alongside nearly 100 other Muslims at the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California on Madison Street in Oakland. It was his first time in public since arriving in California two weeks earlier.

He thanked the crowd for including him in their regular service and said he felt the force of their special prayer for Saleh. Even though Raheem had momentarily doubted his God at Dia's funeral, Saleh's recovery and the support in America were restoring his faith.

Afterward, as Raheem dined on rice and curried chicken in the mosque basement, dozens came by to meet their special guest and take his picture. Everyone wanted to know about Saleh.

Raheem said Betts and his team had just taken sheaths of skin from Saleh's inner thighs and covered his abdomen with them. For the first time since the blast, Saleh's organs were protected by skin.

Raheem told his hosts that his son was going to make it. When they heard the good news, they all had the same reply: "Allahu akbar" (God is great).

Since the Oct. 10 blast, Saleh had endured 20 operations in four different hospitals. Even though months of rehabilitation remained, the prognosis was good.

Raheem felt that he and his son were finally heading toward better days. But he was careful not to talk about his happiness.

In Arabic culture, it was bad luck to do that.