SQL & PL/SQL

I'm a little confused on how to use wildcards to find certain things in a sql query.

I need to pull omit certain tables from my query, and I understand how to do it by doing a 'Ma*', but am not certain how to find preceeding characters.

For instance, my column_name will be formatted like this

aaa_vw_a...

and I need to pull all of the ones that contain the vw and the vwe out of the list. I know I need the like but not sure how to format the wildcards.

Thanks for the help.