They began to arrive when the late-morning sun had risen above the trees, just as the black paving stones at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial had started to get hot. They were teenagers on school trips, and tourists out for a stroll, and veterans of several American wars dressed in matching red T-shirts and red vests to identify them as members of a tour group from California.

As the path grew crowded with hundreds of people, Dan Creed positioned himself at the center of the memorial, a pair of black granite walls inscribed with the names of the dead, across from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. He is a volunteer with the National Park Service. He is also a veteran of the Vietnam War. His infantry unit in the 101st Airborne lost no soldiers to injury or death during his time as the unit’s leader, a notable achievement in a war that killed 58,220 American soldiers and left many thousands more injured and disabled.

After the war, Mr. Creed got married, had six children and built a successful career as a military contractor. On Wednesday, the 50th anniversary of the war’s end, Mr. Creed found that his thoughts about the war — especially the primary place it once held in his mind — had changed.

“I always thought that was my proudest thing, that nobody got wounded or killed” under his command, said Mr. Creed, 76, who lives in Fairfax, Va. Then his children became happy and successful adults. “And that’s the thing I’m proudest of now,” he said.

For decades, the conflict in Vietnam lay at the heart of America’s discussion about itself, about what it meant for the world’s wealthiest nation to fight and lose a war in which the purpose was never clear, and that viscerally divided a generation. On Wednesday, 50 years after the last U.S. soldiers and embassy staff evacuated Saigon, it seemed the war’s central role in American culture had faded.

Few people, it seemed, came to the memorial to mark the anniversary. Many did not even realize it was an anniversary, arriving on long-planned vacations to find a lovely day in the capital, with fresh green leaves on the trees and azaleas in full bloom. In the crowd, many came to look back on Vietnam and the loved ones they had lost through the eyes of the older people they are: still sad, less angry and happier now to talk about the grief they buried half a century ago.