The U.S. Navy’s official Instagram account posted a picture of a Navy skipper taking target practice onboard the USS John McCain on Tuesday, before deleting it after getting dragged by eagle-eyed online marksmen who pointed out that the scope was installed backwards on the commander’s gun.
“US Navy just killing it on Instagram,” posted @BravoKiloActual on X over a screenshot of the deleted post.
The Navy’s official X account addressed the scope situation in passing in a post on Tuesday by thanking posters who’d pointed out their “rifle scope error,” and promised that the picture would stay down until EMI, or “extra military instruction,” was completed.
Over on the r/army subreddit, gleeful GIs jumped on the post.
“Maybe someone should tell the Navy they mounted their optics on backwards,” read the title of one popular thread.
“He’s playing on hard mode,” quipped u/popisms.
“Maybe he’s firing at something really big and needs to see it smaller?” suggested u/BrokenRatingScheme facetiously.
“This is the answer,” replied u/Distorted203. “It’s an effective trick when fighting Godzilla at close range.”
A New York Post writeup of the incident identified the offending officer as Cmdr. Cameron Yaste. According to the Post report, the picture came from a post by the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service and showed Yaste taking target practice at a live-fire exercise event for the U.S. 7th Fleet.
An official X account for the Marines quickly posted a picture of a member of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit taking live-fire practice on a Navy ship on April 6 with the caption “Clear Sight Picture.”
“You knew exactly what you were doing with this post, and I respect it,” posted @GunGnome.
Not everybody saw the humor in the incident though. An opinion piece posted at the right-wing news site Red State called the incident “embarrassing,” and wrote that it revealed a “frightening lack of firearms competence.”
“Anyone who is even remotely familiar with the use of a sight like this—no, strike that, anyone who is even remotely familiar with any kind of optical device at all—would immediately notice something is wrong here,” wrote Ward Clark, a U.S. Army veteran. “But Commander Yaste was either painfully unfamiliar with the U.S. Military’s primary service rifle, or he realized something was wrong but proceeded anyway, to the embarrassment of himself, his ship, and the United States Navy.”
Others stayed laughing at the mess up.
“Look man, I’ve been in the Navy 14 years. Backwards scopes are how we roll,” posted u/cplhicks82 on r/facepalm. “We want that horizon vision.”
The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here to get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.