The six-sentence, GirlieOnTheEdge blog challenge prompt this week is refuse. After a lot of stumbling around thinking of something to refuse, I settled upon a nation’s scar that still hurts.

People called them cowards; the government put them in prison if they stayed in country; they lost homes and families if they didn’t.

Men who refused the draft during the Vietnam Conflict paid a price for their disbelief, as did those who believed differently, and those who went anyway—and the whole country paid right along with them. I think we’re still paying.

A friend admitted he didn’t believe. “But,” he told me, “I didn’t have the courage to disappoint my dad.”

I wonder how those believers and disbelievers felt when Robert McNamara finally said, the U.S. “could and should have withdrawn from South Vietnam” as early as late 1963—I know how I felt.