Navy Seals

While Feigen has fought against the stereotypes women are burdened with, she has not discovered that men are also the victims of society's most violent stereotypes. Does she care that some young men will see "Navy SEALS" and decide that they must join so they can prove their worth? Does she care that innocent women and children would undoubtedly be killed in an attack such as depicted in "Navy SEALS"? No. She only cares that the one white woman in the film is depicted well. DON HAYASHI Culver City

I am at Horton Plaza watching the movie "Navy SEALS." I want to find out what they've been doing in Coronado all these years. "Navy SEALS" is the purported story of the Navy's Sea, Air, Land commandos--rubber boats landing under cover of darkness, blackened faces, piano wire, armed to the molars, guerrilla combat, quick and deadly, etc. The Navy's one-and-only training base for SEALs is at Coronado. SEAL teams are also stationed at Little Creek, Va.

First-time feature production designer Jeremy Hindle admits to some dicey feelings while taking director Kathryn Bigelow on an initial walk-through of "Zero Dark Thirty's" key set. But they weren't rookie jitters. "I remember telling her, 'You're going to feel insanely creepy. You're going to feel like he lived here,'" Hindle says. The verisimilitude Bigelow demanded for all aspects of the film was particularly important to the re-creation of the compound in which Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs last year.

The Sept. 2 Outtakes column asks, "How far will publicists go to exploit the current Mideast crisis?" and then notes that as a cast member of the movie "Navy SEALS" I was asked for my opinions. The author of the Outtakes item either purposefully omitted certain information or did not adequately research my past. If he had, he might have discovered that my grandfather was secretary of the Council of Ministers in Iraq and later became the minister of justice and education; further, that my father was an Iraqi diplomat for 20 years.

Reporting from San Diego — Like any good military man, JP Bolwahnn has it all mapped out. Shortly after he crosses the goal line for the first time, the ball cradled in his arm, the University of San Diego running back will turn toward the American flag and salute. The gesture will be for Petty Officer Danny Dietz, killed six years ago in a firefight with Taliban guerrillas. It will be for Lt. Cmdr. Jonas Kelsall and Chief Petty Officer Robert James Reeves, who died last month when their helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan.

The CIA was nominally in charge when Navy SEALs flew deep into Pakistan in radar-evading Stealth helicopters in May to kill Osama bin Laden and when Predator drones fired missiles to kill Anwar Awlaki in Yemen last month. But America's fabled spy service was eclipsed in both raids by a far more secretive group that flies 10 times as many drones as the CIA. Based in North Carolina, it runs its own intelligence division, flies its own reconnaissance planes and has its own satellites.

The U.S. Navy Seals temporarily suspended live-fire exercises at Camp Billy Machen after an illegal immigrant wandered onto a practice field in Imperial County and was shot in the thigh. The man, whose name was not available, got caught in the middle of exercises Monday despite red flags and patrolling vehicles throughout the 60-square-mile Chocolate Mountain Naval Reservation Aerial Gunnery Range, about 150 miles east of San Diego, a Navy spokesman said.

A Chinook helicopter crash in Afghanistan in August that killed 38 U.S. and Afghan troops, including 17 Navy Seals, was caused by rocket-propelled grenade fire from Taliban fighters, not by any tactical mistakes by the special operations task force commanding the operation, a U.S military investigation concluded. As the CH-47 helicopter was descending to a landing zone in Wardak province, it was struck by an RPG, which sheared off a rear rotor blade and caused the craft to plummet 150 feet into a dry creek bed, where it exploded in a large fireball and killed everyone aboard, Brig Gen. Jeffrey N. Colt, who conducted the investigation, found.

A teleprompter error at the Republican National Convention, not the ad-libbing of a former prisoner of war, led to the identification of two Navy SEALs in violation of military rules, a GOP official said Friday. At the convention on Tuesday, delegates watched a moving video tribute to Medal of Honor winner and fallen SEAL Michael A. Monsoor of Garden Grove. Afterward, Orson Swindle, a retired Marine officer who shared a North Vietnamese prison cell with Republican presidential nominee John McCain, asked two members of Monsoor's SEAL Team 3 to stand, naming them.