Alva Review-Courier -

MOSCOW (AP) — Sitting in her living room, 65-year-old Tatyana Rybalchenko goes through a stack of black-and-white photos from more than 30 years ago. In one of them, she is dressed in a nurse's coat and smiles sheepishly at the camera; in another, she shares a laugh with soldiers on a road with a mountain ridge behind them.

The pictures don't show the hardships that Rybalchenko and 20,000 Soviet women like her went through as civilian support staff during the Soviet Union's 1979-1989 invasion of Afghanistan. Although they did not serve in combat roles, they still experienced the horrors of war...