Was Jesse Ventura a SEAL or a UDT guy? Well, I thought, Jesse certainly looks and sounds like many SEALs I’d known during my 16 years in the Teams. But I’d never known or even …
January 25, 2020
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Stories by Bill Salisbury
Best Reader stories from 1999
Best Reader stories from 1995
I've got Perry Mason on board! In early 1960, the man who created Perry Mason was introduced to an Imperial Beach resident named Francisco Muñoz. Erle Stanley Gardner had many friends, and he particularly liked …
January 11, 2020
Bucolic Bonita
Not so pretty: Bonita’s sign replacement cost Though Bonita's welcome mat has been pulled, the South Bay community is hardly discouraging people from coming by. The “Welcome to Bonita” sign, designed to convey a warm …
September 16, 2019
Bill Salisbury and the Reader
Bill Salisbury an ex-SEAL, wrote for the Reader from 1990 to 2000. Editor's picks of Salisbury stories: Bull Frog Ed Bowen takes command of Navy BUDS on heels of 1999 disaster If you like your …
June 30, 2019
We Did the Dirty Work
Plumbers, Spooks, the Boys in the Band, the Boys Up the River, the Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. Or, as former SEAL Dan Cerrillo referred to them when he testified recently at SEAL Lieutenant Andrew …
September 15, 2005
Nobody Talks, Everybody Walks
All the recent commotion about U.S. atrocities at Abu Ghraib Prison and elsewhere got me thinking about Ka-Bar knives, which in turn got me thinking about former senator and now member of the 9/11 Commission …
July 1, 2004
Neighborhood: small towns of San Diego
I see Asian gang cars some nights, in a long caravan down the Mira Mesa Boulevard. They meet at In-N-Out Burger before heading off for illegal street races on Kearny Villa Road or in Sorrento Valley.
December 24, 2003
Bonita
Bucolic Bonita first bloomed in my experience during a 1965 visit to the shallow valley scooped out across millennia by the Sweetwater River on its run to the Pacific. Even in the mid-’60s the lemon …
December 24, 2003
Desert Storm SEALs recall our first go at Saddam.
17 January has come and gone and with it the 12th anniversary of the brutish, nasty, and short Gulf War. With Gulf War II looming, the media has sought out veterans of Gulf War I …
February 6, 2003
Why (and How?) Did a Navy SEAL Die in Afghanistan?
Another incomplete version of Roberts’s last moments emerged in a New York Times article on March 7 under the headline “Combat Mystery: Last Moments of Navy Man Still a Puzzle.”
April 4, 2002
No One Knew I Had a Knife in My Pocket
Elson maintained that “The most important issue is not Flynn: it’s the terrible state of civil aviation security. It’s just a matter of time before we have another catastrophic terrorist attack like Pan Am 103.”
September 27, 2001
Never Say Retreat
"It was during this last week in November and the first two weeks in December that MacArthur nearly lost his entire force out of arrogance, out of a refusal to believe the enemy was truly there, out of blind ambition."
January 25, 2001
Bull Frog Ed Bowen takes command of Navy BUDS hard on the heels of1999 disaster
If you like your Navy SEALs or frogmen big, brawny, stoked to the eyeballs on steroids, and filled with comic-book bravado, then Captain Ed Bowen will disappoint. His size inspires nicknames like “Peanut” or “Li’l …
December 14, 2000
The Battler
Joe Mazares, at 57, still has the trim, muscled body of the lightweight boxer he once was. "I boxed," he tells me, "under the name 'Joey Vincent' during the late '60s and early '70s. Most …
May 18, 2000
Military men on last week's CH-46 crash off Pt. Loma
I've been thinking about brave young men and ship takedowns since that Marine helo crashed into the Pacific off Point Loma last week. Six marines and a sailor died. During my 16 years as a …
December 16, 1999
Was Jesse Ventura a SEAL or a UDT guy?
Jesse may not talk about what he did as a SEAL in Nam because he doesn’t have anything to talk about. Why does the media let Jesse get away with this?
December 2, 1999
Keith Kimura pulled unconscious from BUDS training tower and dies
The buzz took longer than usual to reach me. A Navy seal named Keith Kimura was pulled unconscious from 60 feet of room-temp, gin-clear water on 10 January 1997 and died the next day at …
March 13, 1997
Pre-med student killed outside Bayou, Virginia Beach dance club
On the last night of her life, Jennifer Lea Evans didn’t want to leave the party. She was drawn to the good-looking Navy SEAL. So she told her girlfriends to go on while she stayed …
August 3, 1995
SEALS give first-hand account of America's Cup spying- part 2
Jack and I made our way through the low-intensity night jog of the Bali Ha'i parking lot that was now nearly filled. We reached our vehicles — Jack's Nissan pickup and my Ford Escort — …
May 11, 1995
SEALS give first-hand account of America's Cup spying, part 1
"Koch's edge over Conner, and later over the Italian team he thrashed to take the Cup, was achieved with the help of espionage tactics... [that included] sending frogmen armed with bubble-free 'rebreathers' to inspect competing …
May 4, 1995
Goon Squad in Hell Week: SEALs Without Wetsuits
Navy SEALs have gotten a lot of good ink across the years since America first read about JFK’s maritime commandos during the Vietnam War. Esquire, for example, featured them in a 1974 story titled "Mean …
March 12, 1992
Anger after Panama SEAL deaths
Military Bright Ideas have a way of ending disastrously and have been doing so at least since the Great War. — Paul Fussed, Wartime (1988) "Them ops was cluster-fucks. more screwed up than a whore's …
October 4, 1990
A Grenada SEAL widow tells her story
Lee Ellen Butcher is Ken Butcher's widow. Ken was a Navy SEAL lost at sea during the Grenada invasion. Ken and I served together with Underwater Demolition Team Eleven at the Amphibious Base in Coronado. …
October 4, 1990
Real Seal: A look back at Vietnam
The year was 1982, and I was fortysomething. Another autumn and the cooling weather had turned the trees outside my office window pale yellow. The leaves trembled in a breeze fresh off the Pacific, blowing …
August 2, 1990