Leadership Quote by Robert A. Brady

Duty is doing the unglamorous thing because the moment demands it, and Brady frames his decision in exactly those terms. The line is engineered to sound personal ("I responded to the request") while immediately widening into a moral obligation ("especially important that we properly honor"). That pivot matters: it shifts the focus away from political choice and toward civic necessity, a classic move for an elected official trying to make an action feel less like positioning and more like stewardship.

The context he invokes - "these times when we are asking so much" - is the pressure point. It implies an era of heightened deployments, public anxiety, or prolonged conflict, when the distance between civilian comfort and military risk feels politically volatile. By emphasizing "asking so much", Brady subtly indicts the home front without ever saying so: if the country is comfortable outsourcing sacrifice, the least it can do is honor the dead correctly. The word "properly" is doing quiet work here, too. It suggests standards, decorum, maybe even a corrective - that honor can be mishandled, politicized, or treated as routine.

The rhetoric is deliberately inclusive ("our men and women"), modernizing the image of service while gathering a broad coalition of listeners. Yet the sentence also contains a strategic insulation. By centering commemoration, Brady avoids debating the wisdom of the wars themselves; honoring the fallen is one of the few near-consensus gestures left in polarized times. The subtext: whatever you think about policy, respect is nonnegotiable - and he intends to be seen on the right side of that line.