A U.S. Army video compilation featuring soldiers marching in cadence with masks on has sparked criticism and mocking, after the service’s official Twitter account posted it on Thursday.
The video, tweeted July 1, begins with a clip of soldiers in their physical training uniforms — black and gold t-shirts and shorts — but wearing masks outdoors while marching.
The tweet said, “The week is almost done! Time for some step-by-step #motivation!! What’s your favorite cadence?”
The sight of soldiers in their PT uniforms marching in cadence while wearing masks prompted confusion and mocking.
Columnist Tim Young tweeted: “Aren’t they all vaccinated? Why are they wearing masks outside?”:
Retired Army Col. Kurt Schlichter tweeted a cadence of his own, calling the Army “a disaster” and “woke”:
BlazeTV host Elijah Schaffer tweeted, “The military isn’t what you think it is”:
The video compilation features four clips. In two of the clips, soldiers are wearing their physical training uniforms with masks on.
The clips in the compilation tweeted Thursday are not dated and there is no context provided in the tweet, but they appear to be from a cadence competition held at Fort Sill last year in August.
The four clips were first posted on Fort Sill’s Facebook page in August 2020, Breitbart News found.
However, even then, masks were controversial — some on social media questioned why the soldiers needed to wear the mask outdoors, while others questioned why some soldiers were not wearing their masks properly. It is not clear why some of the soldiers had to wear masks and others did not.
By Monday evening, the Army’s tweet had been “ratioed” — or had garnered more negative comments and quote tweets than likes.
Follow Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong on Twitter or on Facebook.