As defrost said, having goggles would be normal (probably even required by local unit policy) for any night flight. Whether they are helpful or harmful will vary with conditions so, yeah, when transiting through a dense urban area with lots of ambient light you might actually flip them up (i.e. out of the way, above your line of sight) to see better.
Also as defrost said, nobody can know right now if they were actually in-use at the time of the incident. We have to wait for cockpit voice recordings.
Anyway, it's not really significant, though. I think Secretary Hegseth mentioned it because a portion of the public will equate "flying with night vision" to "flying in daylight" (even though it's not even close), so the DoD was taking all appropriate measures to be safe. Or he was just told that the crew was doing a "goggle reset" flight (because crew members need to log at least one hour of flight time with goggles every 60 days to stay current), and he jumped to a conclusion.
Also as defrost said, nobody can know right now if they were actually in-use at the time of the incident. We have to wait for cockpit voice recordings.
Anyway, it's not really significant, though. I think Secretary Hegseth mentioned it because a portion of the public will equate "flying with night vision" to "flying in daylight" (even though it's not even close), so the DoD was taking all appropriate measures to be safe. Or he was just told that the crew was doing a "goggle reset" flight (because crew members need to log at least one hour of flight time with goggles every 60 days to stay current), and he jumped to a conclusion.