I get that in political office everything in the public eye is a sort of show. What clothes you wear, how you handle yourself, the speeches etc.
So I get it to some anything a politician does is for their own benefit. Nobody wants to look bad of course. But to me this seemed more genuine than most.
And just imagine what was going through the mind of that veteran! You do your part when you were young, filling out the forms, standing in the lines, training. Probably doubting that they would make it out in one piece. Then decades later being thanked by the generations of children that didn't even exist in the world you fought for, but also understands the realities of war better than most. It's got to be surreal.