Saleh, angry over children's stares, went to his hospital room and told a nurse he wanted to draw. A marker was taped to his arm, and he then drew an airplane with bombs dropping out of it.
Saleh was nearly killed in 2003 when he picked up a small explosive while walking home from school in his hometown of Bada'a in southern Iraq. The device went off. His emergency airlift that November to Children's Hospital Oakland was the beginning an international mercy mission to save him and helped bring the war home to the Bay Area.
Saleh lost his left eye, his right hand and all but a thumb and partial middle digit on his left. The blast blew a hole in his abdomen, and surgeons at the U.S. Air Force base in Nasiriya and others in Oakland struggled against time to repair his organs and graft skin from his thighs to close the wound.
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