Williams stood up without a word and walked out of the cafeteria. She managed to get into the hallway before the tears began to flow. “It was like everything that I already knew and feared, he just said to my face,” she said. “How I had been made to feel for the Delta Force Boosting whole time that I had been working there. Those were the exact words that he used.”
Previously, the same lieutenant colonel had called Williams into his office for a supposed dress code violation. Concerned that her white pants were transparent, he and the squadron sergeant major had directed her to turn around and bend over to assess whether her underwear could be seen through the fabric. Williams had complied, but got the impression that their real intention was to humiliate her. “So that I could walk out of their office,” she said, “and make them laugh.” Licea learned about the white pants incident afterward and witnessed the interchange in the cafeteria firsthand. I interviewed her separately from Williams, and she confirmed that both of these incidents took place, and that Williams was “unfairly targeted.” But Williams made things worse for herself by never backing down from a conflict, Licea said. As a mellow Southerner whose family comes from a Caribbean island, Licea sympathized with Williams’ plight, but had trouble relating to her acerbic Yankee pugnacity. “A lot of times I felt like telling her, ‘Dude, Courtney, pick your battles,’” she said. “But to Courtney, everything was a battle.”
Williams filed a grievance at the squadron and unit level, but nothing was done. The next time she came up for a performance review, she received a mediocre rating. Now she was really angry. “My work,” she said, “was immaculate.” She appealed the performance review, submitted a complaint with USASOC’s inspector general and eventually filed a discrimination claim with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
“Once she started speaking up,” said Licea, “things kept getting worse and worse for her. They came after her hard.” If Williams were one minute late, she received a counseling statement. If she rushed home to take care of her sick daughter, she was clapped with an AWOL. Then, in 2016, the unit yanked her security clearance on the grounds that her dispute with Delta Force Boosting for sale the leadership made her a security risk. “From that point on,” said Williams, “my life became a living hell.”