These toddlers don’t yet know what they’re seeing. They don’t yet know what those names engraved on that black wall symbolize.

My sincere hope is that Grandma and Grandpa will tell them one day. I hope, too, that when they show the children pictures of them standing next to that wall that they’ll explain the names and tell them what their presence on that wall means.

I ventured to John Stiff Memorial Park in southwest Amarillo this morning to pay my respects to the 58,000 men and women who died in the Vietnam War. “The Wall That Heals” is here through the weekend. The miniature version of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., will be open 24 hours, enabling Vietnam veterans — if they so choose — to visit the wall and to reflect quietly on what it symbolizes.

I had hoped to talk to vets about their emotions, perhaps to share with them how I was able to heal my own heart in 1989 by visiting Vietnam 20 years after I reported for duty at an Army surveillance aviation battalion at Marble Mountain, just south of Da Nang.

It didn’t happen. I chose to keep my distance from those men. I don’t regret failing to engage them in conversation, as I am confident they have had The Talk with other peers, family members and strangers.

The wall, though, always is worth seeing. It provides a “welcome home” to those Vietnam veterans who didn’t get that simple greeting in real time as they were coming home from war.

Too many Americans did the unthinkable back in those days. They took their anger at a deeply flawed military and foreign policy on the men and women who merely were following orders. They did what their government ordered them to do. For that they were scorned.

It was a moment that will live in eternal shame.

I was among the more fortunate veterans, as I didn’t witness any of the spitting and name-calling, let alone experience it.

We all know it happened.

Time does have a way of making people — and nations — wiser. It did so with our national relationship with Vietnam War veterans.

The Wall That Heals is a demonstration of those evolving attitudes.

Let us hope as well that the children pictured with this post hear also from their elders about how the nation has grown up.