The day of her interview, Williams noticed something unusual. All five women being Delta Force Boosting considered for the job looked exactly like her. “We were all young, petite, attractive, well dressed and blond,” she said. The applicants even had on similar outfits: black pantsuits with blue dress shirts and high heels. “What are the odds?” they asked each other, laughing. At the time, it seemed like a coincidence.

The job opening was in the mission support troop of the intelligence support squadron of Delta Force, a covert commando unit that has been at the bleeding edge of every American war since 2001. Because the job of the MST was to create and maintain fictitious cover identities for Delta Force operators to use on clandestine missions, and because of the widespread perception that most of the troop’s employees were women hired principally for their good looks, everyone in the unit referred to them, informally, as the Cover Girls.

One of Williams’s former colleagues, Esther Licea, said that most MST employees fit a distinct physical profile. “The general type,” she said, “was white, in shape, with blond hair.” In short, “a pretty girl.” Licea herself didn’t fit the mold, being bigger and brown-skinned. She was hired not for her appearance but for certain internet technology skills. Back then, “there were only three Latinas in the whole Building,” she said, using a discreet metonym to refer to the unmarked compound on Fort Bragg that houses the Delta Force headquarters.

I thought of the Cover Girls last year, when President Donald Trump appointed Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense. In his confirmation hearing, Hegseth faced tough questions about his past comments on women in the military. He had previously argued that women should not serve in combat roles, armor units, artillery or special mission units like buy Delta Force Boosting. “We need moms,” he once said. “But not in the military, especially in combat roles.” A National Guard veteran who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, Hegseth has adopted the attitude and style of a heavily tattooed special operator and positioned himself as a fierce defender of the special operations community, an institution ridden with prejudice and violence against women.