Military Veterans

Help is on the way for the hundreds of thousands of families waiting for key documents needed to unlock veterans benefits, as vaccines are finally getting prioritized for the federal agency whose slow return to the office created a massive backlog of records requests, half a million requests long.

“I was mad as hell,” said U.S. Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.), describing how he felt when he learned of the delays last fall. “They served our country; they are true American heroes and they shouldn’t have to wait.”

NBCLX has learned that a key federal agency, responsible for helping veterans secure critical benefits, has gotten so backlogged during the pandemic that hundreds of thousands of veteran families are going without access to benefits they earned while serving the U.S. NBCLX political editor Noah Pransky joined LX News to share what he learned.

It may seem counterintuitive that using virtual reality to put veterans into scenes that replicate their trauma can help them overcome PTSD. But that’s exactly what’s happening with VR technology at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. NBC Los Angeles’ Lolita Lopez went to USC to see how it works firsthand.