LOCAL MAN SAYS BONUS TO COME
Talks Before House Committee Friday
One Council Bluffs lad is doing his part to help you boys after the war. T. Sgt. Clifford Hendricks, 21-year-old son of Mr.and Mrs. C. L. Hendricks, 1228 Sixth avenue, Friday told a congressional committee last week, “there will be another march for a bonus unless ‘adequate legislation’ provides benefits for discharged service men.”
Sergeant Hendricks, who lost a leg in commando action in Tunisia and has been awarded citations for gallantry in action, was the last witness to testify before the house military committee hearing on a bill for mustering out pay, according to an Association Press dispatch from Washington.
Sgt. Hendricks told the committee that men in the foxholes are beginning to “wonder what they are fighting for and it was worth it.”
Sgt. Hendricks has been at the Walter Reed hospital several months for treatment:
“I know what they need and what they want,” he said. “They are concerned about their future and what congress is doing for them.”
Some of the members of the present congress, he reminded the committee, “sent us over there.”
The desire of most service men he has encountered, Hendricks told the committee, is for congress to provide “something to carry us over until we can take care of ourselves.” None of them, he added, wants to be “thrown to the mercy of their friends.”
The three hundred dollars mustering-out pay provided in the legislation, he said, “won’t do the boys too much good” because of pressing needs for housing, food and clothing upon discharge.
“How long is one hundred dollars (the initial payment proposed) going to last any man when that’s all the money he has? he asked, adding that men dishonorably discharged are given civilian clothing by the army while an honorably discharged man keeps his service clothes.
Meanwhile legislation to give all members of the armed services mustering-out pay ranging from $200 to $500 was recommended unanimously by the senate military affairs committee.
Source: The Council Bluffs Nonpareil, Council Bluffs, Iowa, Saturday, December 11, 1943, Page 3
