About 35 years after he visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., U.S. Navy veteran Pete Evans searched for the names of people he knew on a replica of the monument installed in a San Luis Obispo field.

Evans said he’s felt survivor’s guilt “all these years” since the Vietnam War ended.

”The squad goes out on a patrol, and everybody gets killed but one,” Evans said Saturday while visiting the traveling Vietnam War memorial. “That person can feel terrible. And I feel a little bad that I’m not on that wall.”

Evans was among the community members who visited The Wall The Heals at Madonna Meadows next to the Madonna Inn in SLO. The memorial was installed there Thursday through Sunday.

Co-hosted by the San Luis Obispo County Veterans Services Office and the Central Coast Veterans Memorial Museum, The Wall That Heals is a three-quarter scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., that tours the country with a mobile education center, according to a news release. Like the original memorial, it features the names of 58,281 people who died in the Vietnam War.

The memorial, which is 375 feet long and 7.5 feet tall, travels in a 53-foot trailer that transforms into a mobile education center once the memorial is assembled.

Site manager Vic Muschler said Saturday that he and his fellow staff members felt “privileged and honored to be able to bring this national memorial to your community.”

“This is a combination of many months of hard work” by local groups and volunteers, he said. “This healing and this education is what we are all about.”

On Saturday, some visitors searched for the names of their loved ones on the replica wall before making rubbings with pieces of white paper.

Shirley White of Morro Bay had a rubbing made of the name of her cousin Wendell T. Eliason, a helicopter pilot who served with the U.S. Marines.

Paso Robles resident Chuck Lundquist visited the wall to remember his cousin Randall Liget, a Marine who passed away in 1967.

“This is wonderful,” Lundquist said of The Wall That Heals. “It is heartwarming. It’s pretty heavy.”

Another visitor, Navy veteran John Campbell, chatted with Evans while he searched for the name of a friend who stepped on a land mine during his first month of service.

“He was looking for a name, and it happens to be in the same panel as my best friend from junior league baseball,” Campbell said of Evans. “They died at the probably the same month and maybe even in the same place.”

The Wall That Heal’s education center included a photo display of San Luis Obispo veterans who fought in Vietnam, along with videos detailing the history of the Vietnam War, the impact of the memorial and “educational exhibits told through items representative of those left at the Wall in D.C.,” the release said.

During his visit on Saturday, Dean Novotny of San Luis Obispo got emotional reading a letter about a U.S. Army servicewoman, Lt. Sharon Lane, who was killed in the Vietnam War.

Novotny said he didn’t know someone whose name was on the wall. He visited the memorial to pay his respects for the military for their service to the United States, he said.

Adding that he cherishes the freedoms he has living in the U.S., Novotny said he has “a lot of respect” for “anyone to lay down their life for me to continue my freedoms.”

“It touches my heart,” he said, “so I just wanted to come and say thank you to all the Vietnam vets for doing that for me.”

San Luis Obispo County was the first of 32 locations across the nation that will host The Wall That Heals in 2023. Those include four locations in California.