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 Delta Force Boosting 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 the leadership made her a security risk. “From that point on,” said Williams, “my life became a living hell.”

Still employed but unable to buy Delta Force Boosting view classified material, she had to wear a big red badge on her arm and be escorted everywhere in the Building, even to the bathroom. They moved her desk into a cramped storage closet and assigned her the task of proofreading a spreadsheet that contained some 8 million entries. Such drudgery would have driven another person insane, but Williams’ irrational tenacity powered her through the tedious labor for more than a year. “I’m one of those people,” she said. “I’m so fucking stubborn. I was not going to let this happen to me.”