The U.S. Army is looking into a video of a paratrooper who joined in the TikTok Dreams challenge who swapped a skateboard for a parachute
The U.S. Army is looking into a viral video showing a soldier drinking from an Ocean Spray juice bottle and lip-syncing the words of the Fleetwood Mac hit Dreams while on a daytime parachute jump.
The parachuting video was uploaded to the TikTok account @a_drew22, which appears to belong to a soldier named Andrew Gibson. Gibson is not the man in the parachuting video, however, and the soldier in the viral TikTok does not appear in any other videos uploaded to the account.
The video has been viewed about 360,000 times since it was posted on the social media platform TikTok. A copy shared by a news reporter on Twitter has been viewed 72,000 times.
In the video an unidentified paratrooper drinks Ocean Spray juice and sings along to Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams. The social media trend was inspired by a viral TikTok video by Nathan Apodaca in which the now-social media star skateboarded while sipping juice and lip syncing to the Fleetwood Mac hit.
Matthew Tattersall, the soldier in that incident, was ordered to write a 1,000-word essay about the importance of airborne safety and was later given 12 days of extra duty as part of company-grade nonjudicial punishment for the offense.
We’re looking into it. The incident may be a safety violation. We should have this wrapped up by the end of the week.
Col. Joseph Buccino – XVIII Airborne Corps
The paratrooper’s video contains a text block with the acronym AATW (Airborne All The Way) covering the soldier’s name tape, but it appears to have been uploaded by a different soldier.
The video is part of a recent trend spurred by the popularity of a TikTok post by a user named Nathan Apodaca in which he was videoed cruising on a skateboard along an Idaho highway, drinking from a bottle of Ocean Spray Cran-Raspberry juice and lip-syncing to Fleetwood Mac’s 1977 hit.
The song shot back into the charts, and social media users — including band members Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks, and Ocean Spray CEO Tom Hayes — tried to imitate, spoof or recapture the vibe of Apodaca’s original, which has been viewed over 60 million times and garnered over 10 million likes.
A version by troops flying in a military helicopter with a military working dog has also been viewed several million times after being shared on Twitter.
The paratrooper’s video reminded several social media users of an incident in April 2015, when an Army specialist posted a selfie holding his pet Siamese fighting fish in a plastic water bottle during his last jump before exiting the Army.
This is not the U.S. Army’s first take on the TikTok’s Dreams challenge. Soldiers made a video earlier this month that shows them sitting on the edge of a helicopter with a dog wearing goggles drinking Ocean Spray and singing Dreams. The video was shared on Twitter where it has been viewed more than 2 million times.
