They stood beneath gray skies, under a sea of colorful umbrellas, running their fingers along the white names on the cold, black panels. They would find the name, surround it, capture it on film and in memory.

They would clutch their children and spouses as they walked along the length of the Moving Wall, scanning the 58,175 names and thinking of a generation missed.

At noon Saturday, the names of the more than 350 Maine servicemen killed or missing in action in Southeast Asia were read over a public-address system in Bass Park. Each name received a second or two of recognition from all, a little longer from those who gripped one or two of those names in their hand, traced from The Wall onto a slip of white paper.

Some of those sitting under the protection of the gazebo wore suits, some wore faded battle fatigues; all shared a connection to a distant country and the war there.

“The Moving Wall allows each of us to pay our respects to those who gave their lives in Vietnam,” Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell said in a statement read by Robert Whelan, a Vietnam veteran and English lecturer at the University of Maine.

Said another of those sleek, black squares housing the legacy of Vietnam: “The Wall has become, over the years, a symbol of healing from the war.”

And now, pointed out U.S. Sen. William S. Cohen, U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia again risk the loss of American life while fighting for another country.

“The guns of August stand ready to roar again in a foreign land,” he said. Should American troops ever again battle in a foreign land, Cohen said, it is hoped they will not return to the scorn and hatred that many veterans of Vietnam faced when they returned home.

To that war, Cohen lost a friend and teammate from his basketball days at Bowdoin College. On Dec. 26, 1983, Cohen and his family visited the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., finding the name of Allen Loane “buried in a mass grave of black marble,” Cohen wrote in his book of poetry, “A Baker’s Nickel.”

On Saturday, Cohen read the thoughts he turned to prose after that visit, a poem titled “Descent.”

“By design I must descend progressively deeper into the hell of all the names that come like a blizzard of blood, the names no longer just numbers, but mind-numbing names that sing of America, of young men who once lived and laughed, who broke and bled into blackness,” Cohen read. “As I pass this mass grave of names, searching longitude and latitude lines — as if you were a piece of geography — I come closer to the horror, to the pain, but no closer to the answer.”

Before Cohen presented wreaths with Maine Gold Star Mothers Crystal Skidgel and Opal Clark — both of whose sons were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor — and before Don Stratton raised his trumpet to play a haunting, echoing version of taps, veteran Tom Taylor sang Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s “Find the Cost of Freedom”:

“Find the cost of freedom, buried in the ground/Mother Earth will swallow you/Lay your body down.”