“‘I’m so frustrated with this fraternity-like mentality,’” she quoted Savard as saying. “But no one in their right mind would choose to leave Delta Force Boosting and go back to the regular Army,” Williams said. “Because at Delta, you didn’t have to be at work at nine. As long as you got your training, paperwork and pre-deployment stuff done, you just showed up whenever the fuck you felt like it. So even if they were sick of the culture, they’d vent to me about it, but they’d rather die than go back to the regular Army.”
One day over lunch in the dining facility, seated across the table from the commander of the intelligence squadron, Williams raised the possibility of deploying with the unit overseas, as support staff often do, and which would have been a boon to her professionally. Her boss’s reaction caught her completely off guard. He started laughing hysterically, hitting the table with his hands. “You’re not hired to be deployed with the operators,” he told her once he’d regained his composure. “You were hired for your assets,” he said, making a hefting gesture at chest level, “and if they want you to deploy with them, it’s because they all want to fucking run a train on you.”
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 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 cheap Delta Force Boost 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.”