March 29, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Vietnam changed war resister’s life > Belfast man ran Quaker rehabilitation center, later lived on nontaxable income

BELFAST — Dick Johnson’s life was a quiet, determined resistance to war. While America was at war in the 1940s, Johnson, a Quaker, farmed diligently in Wisconsin. When the Religious Society of Friends asked Johnson to oversee a rehabilitation center for amputees in Vietnam in 1968, he went.

And for most of the years after his Vietnam experience, Johnson and his wife lived only on nontaxable income to avoid funding war activities.

Johnson, 82, died of congestive heart failure in Belfast on April 22.

He and his wife had lived for 17 years in Monroe where they helped found Partial Farm, a community land trust, which provides small parcels of property for would-be home builders. They moved to a home in Belfast in 1989.

Although an opinionated man, Johnson was not truculent in his convictions, according to his wife, Cynthia Johnson.

“He was very heartfelt about a lot of things,” said his wife, Cynthia Johnson. “He wrote a lot of poetry and was a very humorous man. He was very gentle in his approach to people.” She recalled one April Fools’ Day when she arose in the morning, slipped her feet into her loafers and found she couldn’t move because they had been nailed to the floor.

But Johnson’s lifelong affiliation with the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), a nondogmatic denomination that espouses pacifism, informed much of his conduct and philosophy of life.

Johnson was born in Madison, Wis., on Dec. 10, 1915. He attended Antioch College in Ohio where he met his future wife. In Quaker tradition, instead of a pastor performing a wedding ceremony, the couple “married themselves,” Johnson said. He farmed and eventually earned a master’s degree in library science from Syracuse University in New York. He then worked as a librarian for the University of Wisconsin Center System.

It was in the late 1960s that the American Friends Service Committee contacted Johnson and asked if he would consider overseeing a project in Quang Ngai, a provincial capital in Vietnam about 350 miles north of Saigon. The mission, referred to as “A Service of Love in War Time,” provided therapy and artificial limbs for injured Vietnamese civilians. While the provincial hospital treated immediate, acute injuries, there were few places for amputees to heal and receive therapy. The mission also operated a day care.

“We decided that if we could do anything to save lives, we’d do it,” Johnson said. So at age 52, Dick Johnson began overseeing volunteer medical personnel and orchestrating construction of additional wards — all near the north-south border of Vietnam. “It’s largely a Buddhist population,” Johnson said of the people they lived among, “So they also didn’t have much interest in war.”

The couple had planned to stay for two years, but their work was cut short by the 1968 Tet Offensive, which escalated the level of fighting near Quang Ngai. For weeks the hospital was cut off from contact with the outside world. The Johnsons, like others, hid under tables indoors at times as tanks rolled through the streets. They eventually evacuated to the project’s Hong Kong headquarters, where they continued to administer the rehab center.

When the couple returned to their jobs in the States, they found that the war experience had changed them, Johnson said. They made a decision that they could no longer in good conscience contribute money to a government that was doing “horrifying things” with tax dollars, said Johnson. “It was Dick who really took this step,” she said. “He was quite a decisive person.” Thereafter, for 30 years the two lived on earnings below or out of reach of taxation.

To accommodate that lifestyle choice, they moved to Monroe in 1972 with three of their four grown children and helped found Partial Farm, the community land trust. For three years they lived in yurts, then swapped their yurt for a more conventional home on the farm. Her husband, a voracious gardener, received a modest income from grading and commenting on English composition papers for a Holyoke Community College in Massachusetts.


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