The men and women who serve in our military have won for us every hour we live in freedom, sometimes at the expense of the very hours of the lifetimes they had hoped to live.

Riley frames military service as a continual, time-by-time purchase of civic freedom: “every hour we live in freedom” is presented as something earned and safeguarded by others’ labor and risk. The second clause sharpens the moral weight by contrasting ordinary citizens’ lived hours with the “hours” service members lose—whether through death, injury, or the forfeiture of ordinary life plans. The phrasing emphasizes not only sacrifice in the abstract but the concrete theft of future time from those who “had hoped to live” it. The quote functions as commemorative rhetoric, urging gratitude and a sense of obligation to honor veterans and the fallen through remembrance and responsible citizenship.