Las Vegas Review Journal:

Marines are making progress in curbing violence in Iraq’s Anbar province, and they’re doing it with help from local Iraqis and with hope that freedom will soon take hold, said a lance corporal who just returned from the war zone. With his wife and 13-month-old daughter by his side on the back porch of her parent’s Las Vegas home, Lance Cpl. Dustin Sholl said the American public is not hearing about the strides being made. Instead, news out of Anbar and Baghdad has been mostly about casualties since the U.S. troop surge was launched there in February, triggering some of the bloodiest months since the 2003 invasion. “You don’t see half of the good stuff that we do,” Sholl, 25, said Wednesday. “The only thing they talk about is these civilians died or these Marines died, or soldiers,” he said. “They don’t hardly ever publish the good things we do, such as finding bad guys, finding IEDs (improvised explosive devices), weapons caches. “They’re not telling you about the towns that we do well in where the population accepts us well and helps us out. They give us tips … on what to look for and who to look for. We accomplish huge tasks almost weekly like that.” Sholl, a Harrier attack jet maintainer, spent the past nine months deployed with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit at Al Asad Air Base near the border with Syria. As he spoke, the multinational forces’ press desks in Iraq were issuing a typical day’s dispatches that described the accomplishments…