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 that to some people anything a politician does is purely 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 having doubts that they would make it out in one piece. Then decades later being thanked in person by a leader from the generations of children that didn't even exist in the world you fought for, but who also understands the realities and tolls of conventional war at an individual level. It's got to be surreal.