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Posted: 8:34 PM- CAMP WILLIAMS - A different world.

That's the best way - maybe the only way - to describe what Jeremiah Clarke found in Iraq's once-chaotic Anbar Province.

"There were people all over the place, businesses were open, and there were kids everywhere," said Clarke, a member of Charlie Company, of the 4th Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, which returned to Utah on this afternoon following a seven-month tour of duty in Anbar's second largest city, Fallujah.

The Salt Lake City resident's first visit to the predominantly Sunni province in Iraq's vast western desert was in 2005, at the height of the insurgency and the start of a Sunni-Shiite civil war that claimed tens of thousands of Iraqi lives. Back then, the U.S. Marines that occupy the province routinely found the streets empty of people and littered with endless roadside bombs. They endured constant shelling and sporadic sniper fire. They suffered the loss of scores of comrades.

This time - in more than 20,000 miles of patrols, the Charlie Marines were met by just two roadside bomb attacks, only one of which injured a member of the company. That Marine was convalescing at his mother's Florida home within a week.

Improvements in security over the past half-year have been felt in many places across Iraq, but nowhere more so than in the Anbar Province, where tribal sheiks - funded by U.S. cash - have formed so-called "awakening councils" and turned against insurgent groups such as Al Qaida in Iraq.

Brian Blackmer, who first served in Anbar in 2006 and came back to the province with Charlie Company just over a year later, said he was shocked by what he found on his return trip. "There were Iraqi police officers everywhere," said Blackmer, a native of San Jose, Calif. "There were cops on every corner. My first time, if you saw an Iraqi police officer - well, the thing is, you just didn't."

Indeed, at least 23,000 Iraqi police officers are said to now be on duty in Anbar, according to U.S. military officials.

That hasn't stopped the bloodshed - at least 11 U.S. service members have died in Anbar since the start of the year - but it has slowed the losses. During the same period, last year, 95 died.

That was the somber situation that Charlie commander Mark Campbell tried to prepare his 145-member company for when it began training last year.

"We fully expected them to see more action than there was," said Campbell, of Walnut Creek, Calif. "We all had to go through a dramatic mind-set change."

Notably, Campbell said, his Marines were instructed to change the way they approached oncoming vehicles. Noting that coalition forces hadn't faced a suicide car bombing in Anbar in more than a year, Campbell said he instructed his Marines "to treat every vehicle was if it were friendly."

Brett Hansen, of Logan, said he and other Marines gradually began to think of Anbar as "not being our country."

"We treated it as though it is their's, not ours," Hansen said.

And in response, said second-tour Marine Michael Easley, "the Iraqis seemed to like us more. People were a lot friendlier this time - a lot."

Led by the security improvements in Anbar and a cease-fire called by a prominent Shiite cleric, Iraq has experience a precipitous drop in violence over the past half-year.

But ominously, perhaps, fatalities among U.S. service members rose in April to the highest level in six months. And casualties among Iraqi citizens have been rising steadily for several months now, particularly due to new fighting among Shiite factions in and around the country's capital of Baghdad.

Some Charlie Marines - a few of whom expressed private disappointment about not seeing more action during their tour - joked that the Pentagon needed to send them back to "finish the job" in the rest of the country.

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