SALEH KHALAF’S face tells you everything you need to know about collateral damage. The boy’s left eyeball is missing, his teeth smashed, his skull slightly swollen.

Saleh’s right arm turns into a stump below the elbow. His left arm is fine — apart from the three missing fingers. Saleh, aged ten, gets by, in his cheerful way, with a dextrous little left thumb and what remains of his teeth.

“I love America better than Iraq,” says the grinning child, whose doctors call him Lion Heart. “Too much bullets in Iraq. Too much bombs. I remember waking up in America. I like that very much, thank you.”

With that, Saleh gets up on his slightly crooked, wobbly legs (clad in Gap combat trousers) and chases his sisters through the outpatient clinic of the Children’s Hospital & Research Centre at Oakland, California.

Then you notice the odd shape of Saleh’s belly — caused by having his intestines blown out by the explosive device that he picked up in his village in southern Iraq, thinking it was a toy. His mother tried to scoop them up with her hands and put them back.

Saleh’s 16-year-old brother, Dia, did not survive the blast.

The story of Saleh Khalaf, the second son of a taxi driver from the Shia village of Badaa, near al-Nasiriyah, is among the most remarkable tales of human suffering, endurance and generosity to emerge from the Iraq conflict.

Unlike the purported rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, however, the saving of Saleh Khalaf by US soldiers and doctors has not been trumpeted by the Pentagon — perhaps because his injuries were most likely caused by an unexploded American cluster bomb.

Saleh’s father, Raheem, accompanying his son to his first outpatient check-up after 30 operations in two years, still finds it hard to recount the story of his son’s extraordinary journey to America.

It began after the brothers picked up the unexploded munition on their way back from school in October 2003. At the hospital in al-Nasariyah there were no medications and the unpaid staff often did not turn up for work. Desperate, and overwhelmed with grief at the loss of his oldest son, Mr Khalaf drove to the US airbase at Tallil and approached the checkpoint, knowing he could be shot as a suicide bomber.

“I knew it was dangerous,” he says through an interpreter. “The soldiers surrounded me with guns and I put up my hands.” A friendly Iraqi interpreter intervened on his behalf. Sobbing, Mr Khalaf begged for help and the soldiers were so moved that they sent an ambulance for Saleh.

The child was close to death when he reached the base. Gangrene was spreading through his abdomen. Jay Johannigman, a US Air Force doctor, performed emergency surgery to keep the boy alive.

The doctor, 47, then used the internet to find an American hospital that would perform the much more complex operations required for the boy’s survival. Only the Children’s Hospital at Oakland answered his plea, and its doctors agreed to give their services free. With the Pentagon’s approval, Saleh and his father were flown 35 hours to California as the boy’s condition rapidly deteriorated. He arrived just in time, and the process of excruciatingly painful surgery began.

Saleh had his final operation this month. Surgeons removed a fingertip-sized piece of shrapnel lodged deep within his brain. “The metal went through his eye socket and across his brain to the other side. It missed the main arteries by millimetres,” says Peter Sun, a 39-year-old Chinese-American neurosurgeon, as he examines his young patient. “It was really quite miraculous that he managed to survive.”While his son was recovering in California, Mr Khalaf had other worries. Militants back in Iraq were accusing the rest of his family of being spies.

Following pleas from the hospital, the US granted the family political asylum. Saleh’s mother, Hadia, and her other children — Zahara, 6, Marwa, 3, and Ali, 1 — were driven through Iraq to Jordan at speeds of 110mph to escape bandits. The family is now slowly becoming Americanised. Mr Khalaf, who works as a gardener at the hospital, sports a rockabilly Elvis hairdo, electric-blue shirt and tasselled loafers. The Khalafs have a flat in Oakland, paid from a trust fund: the money came from readers moved by an account of Saleh’s plight in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Occasionally Saleh’s trauma resurfaces. “I remember me and my brother playing,” he announces, unprompted, in a tiny voice that is rapidly losing its Iraqi accent. “I draw him sometimes, and I talk to him when I’m by myself. I miss my brother.”