Helping one girl face the future with hope

Grueling process begins

THEY began four days later. At UCLA, Dr. Miller smiled at her. She let herself smile back at him -- briefly. Then she looked down at the beige carpet.

"Marwa, hi," he said. "How are you doing today?"

She was in an examination room. Miller would let me accompany him as he tried to undo the damage the shrapnel had done. It was devastating to see a child so badly disfigured, but I loved her spine-straight courage. So did Miller. A lean, energetic man in his mid-60s, he had been in South Vietnam. He had been shot at, heard missiles explode, seen children die.

"This is personal," he said. "I have to help."

He brought his face close to Marwa's and studied the jagged contours. Where her nose had been, it seemed as if a small volcano had blown its top. Only the base remained, a clump of flesh. She could breathe normally, but she had holes for nostrils. And there was the zigzag scar.

Still, he thought, she was strikingly pretty. Her eyes were big and expressive, and she had a slight overbite that pushed her lips into a curl when she grinned, making her seem sheepish and vulnerable.

Miller had helped to restore thousands of faces. He knew about the psychology of self-image -- how hard it must be for a striking girl to suffer such a deformity.

"She's not in great shape for this," he told me on the phone late one night. "This is going to be extremely difficult. What happens in the first procedure, that's going to set the course for the next operation and how this all will go."

He figured it could take five, maybe six surgeries -- half a year, at least. He was concerned that everyone around Marwa might think this would be easy, as if it were some sort of a slam dunk. He said he had called two other surgeons to help him figure out which technique to use.

How do you build a nose from nothing? He compared it to what paratroopers had done in South Vietnam. "Working on her, it's going to be like jumping out of an airplane," he said, "and just hoping the chute opens."

Marwa's first leap came Feb. 10, after a sleepless night.

She had sat on her bed until dawn in a sparse room at Saad's duplex, looking at photos of her family, everyone except her mother. She had no pictures of her mother.

She would remember hearing wind rattle against the windows -- and trembling.

At 6:30 a.m., she was at UCLA, surrounded by doctors and nurses. She eyed them warily, clutching a soft, brown teddy bear.