Canadians aren’t known for their “laugh out loud” sense of humour, so when pictures surfaced earlier this week of soldiers on a military base striking a pose in too-tight Justin Bieber T-shirts, no one suspected that Canucks were behind the gag.

The photos of four soldiers, posing for the camera and working out while wearing kiddie-sized Bieber T-shirts — in black, white and two shades of pink — were posted to reddit.com Sunday. They immediately went viral and were viewed by more than 750,000 people before quickly being taken down Tuesday.

Rumours started flying that the soldiers were marines, posing in shirts that one of their moms had sent. Keen online commenters started picking apart the images, looking for clues, all of which led back to Canada.

The Starfound the four soldiers, who are members of the 1st Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment, and got the real story.

The photos were taken during a brief moment of lightness in a months-long deployment to Afghanistan, said Pete McLean, whose moustache was the main clue that led many to suspect the soldiers were not marines, who aren’t allowed facial hair. McLean says he wore the handlebar-looking moustache as a good-luck charm, and shaved it off the day he left Afghanistan.

“For a few minutes it made everyone forget about where we were and what we were doing. It was just a big joke for a few minutes,” McLean said.

The Justin Bieber photos were taken in December 2010 at a combat outpost in Kandahar. McLean, 25, Jason Birch, 23, Ronald Dalton, 23, and Ed Turner, 30, were in the same battalion. Dalton is now retired, but the rest are still active soldiers.

“We had just picked up and moved to a new area of operations,” said Birch. “Some of our fellow soldiers were becoming more and more homesick.”

Laughter, he said, is the best morale boost, something they got a lot of from those photos.

“You could be tired, soaking wet, freezing and hungry but that small joke takes your mind off everything bad for a small moment.”

McLean bought the T-shirts at Walmart on a whim while on a three-week vacation halfway through his deployment. He pulled them out on their last day at camp, and they wore them for the group of soldiers from Quebec sent to replace them. They cranked up the boy band music and struck a few poses to show the new soldiers what life was like at the camp.

“Throughout the tour, once in awhile, we just played little jokes on each other like that just to boost morale,” McLean said.

McLean said a friend posted the pictures online this week without forewarning so he was understandably concerned when he was called into his superior’s office Monday. But instead of a reprimand he was assured he wasn’t in trouble and that his commanding officers knew the men had just been having fun.

“It’s a healthy release and I think if a commander ever found that his troops had stopped the antics then he’s going to have a problem,” said ex-soldier and editor of Esprit de Corps magazine, Scott Taylor.

It’s an indication that the soldiers are coping with the things they see day to day, he said, adding it’s a part of facing the realities of war.

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McLean said his time in Afghanistan was a good experience and he would love to go back. He learned a lot and says the photos are evidence that there was some good among the bad.

“I’m just glad I’m not in any trouble or anything.”

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