LA PINE — Toward the top of the polished black wall, Marty Carah found the names.

Gary R. Parsons.

Bruce L. Kennedy.

Both were childhood friends. Both were killed in the Vietnam War.

Carah, a 77-year-old Army veteran who served in Vietnam in 1967, searched for the names Friday and saw them next to each other on The Wall That Heals, a portable version of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The 375-foot-long wall arrived in La Pine on Tuesday and will be open to the public until 1:30 p.m. Sunday at the Frontier Days Land on Sixth Street.

“It brings up a lot of memories,” said Carah, who now lives in Prineville, as he looked at the names of his friends. “The trouble is, it’s not good ones.”

Carah went to junior high and high school with Kennedy and was in the same Boy Scout troop with Parsons. They all grew up together in Santa Monica, California, before Parsons and Kennedy joined the Marines and went to Vietnam.

The two were killed on the same day in 1966.

The wall lists the names of more than 58,000 people who died in the Vietnam War, including more than 700 from Oregon. Twenty-three names are from Central Oregon. Many of those who visited the La Pine display used a special piece of paper and a pencils to rub over the names on the wall and create a keepsake.

Carah, who uses a cane to walk, had to reach high, but he was able to leave the wall with tracings of both of his friends.

Mike Halverson, a 65-year-old retired La Pine resident, visited the wall Friday to find the name of a neighborhood friend he grew up with in Milwaukie, Oregon. The friend, Daniel Mambretti, was 5 years older and had a reputation for being a rowdy kid, Halverson said.

“He was one of the neighborhood kids,” Halverson said. “There was a group of roughnecks in that neighborhood, so fortunately I was a little bit younger.”

Halverson was in high school in 1970, when he learned Mambretti was killed in Vietnam. He remembers all of his classmates talking about it.

Halverson also created a rubbing of Mambretti’s etched name. He planned to send it to one of Mambretti’s closest friends.

At the other end of the wall Friday, Lisa Mazurek felt a mix of emotions when she found the name of a family friend who went missing for six months with her uncle in Vietnam. Her uncle, Bill Woods, was found, but the friend, Richard Mallon, never came home. The two were high school classmates in Portland.

Mazurek, 32, who lives outside of La Pine, was excited to take a picture of Mallon’s name on the wall and show her family, but she was also reminded of all the emotional stories she heard growing up about Mallon and her uncle.

“When we got the news my uncle went missing, everybody kind of gave up,” Mazurek said. “Six months later, there was a knock on the door. My dad opened it, and thought he was looking at a ghost because it was my uncle.”

Mazurek said her uncle has no interest in visiting the memorial wall, even to see Mallon’s name. He knows too many other names as well, she said.

“It’s overwhelming for me,” Mazurek said. “But my uncle definitely would have been overwhelmed.”