Refuse to Be Silenced: Kayla Williams and the Long Fight for Women Who Serve

She learned Arabic on September 11, crossed into Iraq with the invasion, and came home to a country that keeps trying to erase women like her from the record.

Kayla Williams was sitting in an Arabic classroom in Monterey, California on the morning of September 11, 2001.

She was partway through 63 weeks at the Defense Language Institute, in class six and seven hours a day, five days a week, drilling a language the Army handed her because she scored high enough on the aptitude test to earn one of the hard ones. Arabic sits at the top of that list next to Chinese. She had joined the Army a year earlier without any illusion that war was impossible. Her drill sergeants had been to Bosnia and Somalia, and she had no patience for anyone who claimed surprise. "Have you ever read the news or a history book? The US is always somewhere, doing something." Still, that morning changed the math.

"I knew immediately that I was going to go to war," she says.

The answer to when came in 2003. Williams crossed the berm from Kuwait into Iraq during the initial invasion and spent about a year at war doing signals intelligence, intercepting and direction finding enemy communications as one of the Army's Arabic linguists. What she carried into that year, and everything she has carried since, explains why she stood up this year when a ceremony meant to honor women veterans was canceled over politics. She showed up anyway. She spoke anyway.

The Long Way In

Williams enlisted in 2000, in her early twenties, older than the teenagers around her at basic training. The woman who is now her best friend enlisted at 17 and had her 21st birthday in Iraq. In an open bay with 39 other women, some recruits cried because they missed their mothers. "I was crying because I missed having my own washing machine," she says.

She had already done everything in the order she was told to do it. A degree in English literature, which felt like cheating. "I read books as my hobby, and they gave me a degree for doing my hobby. I kind of got over on them." A house. A car. A steady boyfriend. A job. It looked like a life and felt like a script. She describes a fear of waking up in her forties not knowing how her own life had happened to her.

Then she got a new boss, and then she got fired. Part of it, she will tell you plainly, was that she cried at work when the clashes got bad, and tears do not help anyone succeed in the workforce. She wanted graduate school she could not pay for. She wanted emotional control nobody had taught her. She was flailing, and the Army made an offer no civilian employer could match. A drill sergeant would teach her to manage her emotions. The GI Bill would pay for graduate school. The government would teach her a foreign language instead of charging her for one. And she would get a chance to serve the country that invested in her when she was a kid on food stamps.

She grew up poor, raised by a single mother who was an artist. Food stamps came and went. In high school she carried free lunch tickets, "those little shame tickets to make you feel bad about being poor."

Poverty had already taught her the lesson the Army would later finish. "I had to learn from when I was pretty young to do things for myself. Nobody was gonna do it for me."

No single reason put her in a recruiter's office. It was how all of them wove together.

Crossing the Berm

Basic training asked her to perform a rage she did not feel. Recruits stabbed tires nailed to wood with bayonets while screaming, and drill sergeants demanded a war face. Williams understood the design, breaking people down to build them back up, but she could not pretend. "This feels ridiculous," she remembers thinking. "I want to learn the skills. Shoot, move, communicate, stop bleeding." The theater was not for her.

The war itself asked a harder question. Williams did not buy the official reasons for invading Iraq. If it was about genocide against the Kurds, the country had looked away from Rwanda. If it was about weapons of mass destruction, North Korea was advertising its own. "The reasons we were given for going to Iraq seemed disingenuous at their best," she says. But she had sworn an oath, and to her that oath meant trusting the political process to decide when the country goes to war. The American people elected the president and the Congress, and Congress authorized the invasion. "Who was I, as an E4, as a specialist in the Army, to say every single one of these people was wrong, and my personal judgment is right?"

There was also a truer, closer reason. "I didn't think, I'm gonna go to war for America. I thought, I'm gonna go to war with the troops I've been training with," she says. "I don't want to let them down and leave them without me."

By the time her unit sat in Kuwait waiting for the order, she felt something she calls awkward to admit. Eagerness. She compares the wait to the waiting place in Dr. Seuss, the worst place to be. "I would rather just go and get it over with than keep waiting," she says. "I've been training for this job for years. Let's just get into it."

Williams, a senior advisor with Vet Voice Foundation, at a roundtable in March 2026. Photo courtesy of Kayla Williams.

Williams getting pinned during her Army service. Photo courtesy of Kayla Williams.

What She Could Endure

The shortest job Kayla Williams ever held was at a Dairy Queen. She lasted two days. Everything was sticky, the blizzard machine felt like a threat, and she quit because she could. She walked into an air conditioned office job instead, because in civilian life quitting is always on the table.

"You can't quit the Army," she says. "If you stop showing up, they will put you in jail." And nobody just goes home from Iraq.

"When there is no option other than to keep going," she says, "suddenly you realize humans can do hard things."

She is careful not to dress this up as a can do attitude. Growing up, nobody was coming to save her, so she calls it something else. Must do. It must be done, so somebody has to do it, so she will do it. Plenty of people learn resilience from their family's stories. Hers came harder. "I didn't know exactly how much I could endure," she says, "until I was in that environment where I had to endure it."

Williams getting to know local residents during her deployment.
Photo courtesy of Kayla Williams.

Coming Home to a War

The Army's preparation for reintegration, as Williams remembers it, was a chaplain telling the formation, don't beat your wives. "Some of us are not allowed to have wives," she remembers thinking. Don't Ask, Don't Tell was still the law, and that briefing was the entire preparation for coming home.

Nothing prepared her for what actually came home. The man who is now her husband was wounded in Iraq in October 2003, a penetrating traumatic brain injury. He recovered at Walter Reed, then was released back to Fort Campbell around the time the rest of the division returned. The two of them started dating during block leave, a month off when everybody was out drinking to celebrate being alive and nobody had responsibilities, so nothing about his condition looked unusual yet.

Then she went back to 6 AM formations, and he did not. There were no warrior transition units then. His unit told him to stay home because his injury was still visible and it was scaring the new soldiers. So a wounded man sat alone with no structure, no routine, and no purpose. He stayed up all night drinking and slept all day. His paycheck disappeared before the bills came due because the injury took his memory of them. Williams and his mother pushed the Army together until it sent him back to Walter Reed for more treatment.

She left the Army in 2005, in part to help him recover, and they married. She had no medical training and no preparation for loving someone with a brain injury and post traumatic stress. She got angry at what were, in fact, his symptoms. The shame arrived right behind the anger. "How can I be angry at a war hero?" she says. She went to graduate school full time, worked full time, and kept the household running. "It must be done, so somebody has to do it, so I will do it," she says. "But I will be cranky about it. I will get resentful about it."

She had chosen international relations, imagining the State Department, until she asked her husband a question she wishes she had asked before picking the major. Did he want to live abroad? He did not. He pointed out that the State Department would send an Arabic speaker to an Arabic speaking country, and he had been blown up in an Arabic speaking country. She rebuilt her plans again and went to work at a think tank instead.

She wrote two books along the way. The first, Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army, poured out of her when she was freshly home. She describes it as vomiting her experiences onto the page, then discovering that a book tour meant she had not walked away from any of it. The second, Plenty of Time When We Get Home: Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War, was deliberate. She chose to write about what her husband's injuries and medications did to their intimacy, because, in her words, "nobody talks about intimacy when trauma is in your life, and somebody needs to admit it."

"I tried to be honest. I tried to be candid, even about things that I did wrong, things that I was ashamed of, to give other people the space to acknowledge it."

"I'm not gonna pretend I was a great soldier," she says. "I'm not gonna pretend I was a great wife."

She will tell you she is a person, and people screw up. "The important thing is, can we learn from that and be better and do better?"

The History She Didn't Know

Williams later ran the VA Center for Women Veterans, and the job taught her a history her own service never had. Women enlisted in the Navy before women could vote. The Hello Girls connected calls in World War I. The 6888th moved mountains of mail. She points to decades of official limits, caps on how many women could serve and how high they could be promoted, service academies closed to women until the late 1970s, and careers ended the moment a woman became pregnant.

She learned that women came home from those wars asking for benefits and recognition the country would not give. She hears an echo of the African American experience in it, fighting for a country that withholds equal rights, then coming home with the receipts of sacrifice in hand and having to ask for equality anyway. This is part of a long legacy, she says, of women who served their country and did not get equal recognition when they came home. "It is not new, and it is not surprising. It is depressing."

Her own generation's fights felt, for a while, like the last ones. She was part of the effort to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell. She worked to rescind the combat exclusion policy, arguing from experience. In Iraq the Army needed her forward as an Arabic speaker who could talk to local women, but the policy would not let her be assigned to combat units, so they borrowed her. Attached, not assigned, working alongside infantrymen whose tactics she had to learn on the fly. The military built the Lioness program, female engagement teams, and cultural support teams to put women where it needed them, until leadership finally admitted the obvious and opened the jobs. "I thought we won," she says. "Let me hang up that mission accomplished banner."

Williams at a shrine during her deployment. Photo courtesy of Kayla Williams.

The Ceremony That Wasn't

Then the webpages started coming down. Pages honoring women in uniform, removed. "It told me that they wanted to erase history and try to take us back in time," she says. Senior leaders, women and Black officers among them, pushed out. Williams says the current Secretary of Defense has stated in writing that he does not believe women should serve in the infantry, and she believes him. "Efforts to erase our successes are purposeful," she says. "He wants to project an image of what a warrior looks like. He doesn't think that it should look like you, or like me."

So when a ceremony honoring women veterans was canceled over politics, Williams stood with Vet Voice Foundation and spoke where the ceremony should have been. She was also standing in for the people who could not, the ones whose jobs or fears keep them quiet.

Ask her why it mattered to be there and the answer comes without hedging. "I believe that truth and facts and history matter, and that it is important to stand on the side of reality. We cannot let them erase history, erase our legacy, refuse to honor the diversity of those who serve in the military."

She carried names with her that day. Alyssa Peterson, a woman she served with who died in Iraq. Shoshana Johnson, held as a prisoner of war and returned with honor. "This legacy cannot be erased," she says. "We cannot let these stories be hidden.

Williams at a press conference on veterans' reproductive freedom outside the U.S. Capitol in September 2025. Photo courtesy of Kayla Williams.

What She Tells Young Women Now

For twenty years after leaving the Army, whenever a young woman asked whether she should join, Williams said yes. She knew the statistics on harassment and assault. Part of her career was spent working to drive those numbers down and improve care for survivors. She said yes anyway. "There are risks, but there are risks in anything. The Army is what propelled me into a middle class lifestyle." Her VA benefits paid for college and a house and built the childhood for her own kids that she never had.

At this moment, she hesitates, and the hesitation makes her feel terrible. "It feels like a very dangerous moment to be a part of an institution that has total control over you," she says. She is less confident that a service member who is assaulted today will get appropriate care, and less confident still about justice. She fears junior troops will be ordered to do things that are illegal, and that the most junior people, the ones with the least power to object, will be the ones thrown under the bus afterward.

Her advice now comes with a caveat she never used to need. "Do what you have to do to survive," she says. "Might be worth waiting a couple years. See how things shake out."

Still Standing

Williams has been at some version of this fight since she raised her right hand in 2000. "I am so tired," she says. "I feel like I've been struggling for so long." She can describe exactly what she would rather be doing. "I would like to go and sit by a stream in the woods and listen to the birds and relax and let other people take over the struggle. But apparently, it is not my time yet."

"I do not want to be 85 years old and still out there in the fight, protesting and marching," she says. She would rather the fight be over. She would rather say the equality is won, hand the whole thing to the next generation, and go find that stream.

Until then, she falls back on the attitude that carried her through all of it. Not can do. Must do.

"I'm gonna keep being loud," she says.

Resources

Vet Voice Foundation | https://vvfnd.org/

The veteran-led nonprofit where Williams serves as a senior advisor, training veterans to become civic leaders and policy advocates.

VA Center for Women Veterans | https://www.va.gov/womenvet/

The VA office Williams once led, which monitors and coordinates VA health care, benefits, and services for women veterans.

Women Veterans Call Center | https://www.womenshealth.va.gov/programoverview/wvcc.asp

Call, text, or chat with trained women representatives about VA health care, benefits, and resources at 1-855-829-6636.

VA Military Sexual Trauma Care | https://www.mentalhealth.va.gov/msthome/

Free VA treatment for physical and mental health conditions related to military sexual trauma, with no documentation or disability rating required.

DoD Safe Helpline | https://safehelpline.org/

Confidential, anonymous, 24/7 support for members of the military community affected by sexual assault, at 877-995-5247.

VA Caregiver Support Program | https://www.caregiver.va.gov/

Support, counseling, and local referrals for anyone caring for a veteran, with a toll-free Caregiver Support Line at 1-855-260-3274.

Veterans Crisis Line | 988, then Press 1 | https://www.veteranscrisisline.net/

Free, confidential, 24/7 support for veterans, service members, and the people who love them, also reachable by text at 838255.