In January 1986 I was lucky enough to visit the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. It was an incredibly moving and humbling experience to me even though I had no names to search for. I grew up seeing coverage of the Vietnam War on the TV news every evening, but I was young enough that the conflict never touched me personally.

It was only last week that I finally had the chance to explore the California Vietnam Memorial in Sacramento’s Capitol Park. Like the memorial in D.C., this is a place where you want to linger and find a way to engage with everything you see in an effort to make some sense of the Vietnam War… if that’s possible. I hope to go back on a cooler, more overcast day when I’m not hurrying off to another engagement. Somehow that seems much more fitting.