Killed in action

Killed in action (KIA) is a casualty classification generally used by militaries to describe the deaths of their own personnel at the hands of enemy or hostile forces at the moment of action. Furthermore, the term died of wounds (DOW) is often used to denote personnel who reach a medical treatment facility before dying.

Quotes

• Major, tell my father I died with my face to the enemy.
  • Death note of Confederate Colonel Isaac E. Avery, written as he lay dying on the slopes of Cemetery Hill at Gettysburg (July 3, 1863)

• Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!
    There’s none of these so lonely and poor of old,
    But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold.
  These laid the world away; poured out the red
  Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be
    Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,
    That men call age; and those who would have been,
  Their sons, they gave, their immortality.
  • Rupert Brooke, "The Dead" (1914), octave

• Went the day well? We died and never knew;
  But well or ill, England, we died for you.
  • J. M. Edmonds, "On Some who died early in the Day of Battle" (6 February 1918)

• When you go home, tell them of us, and say
  ‘For your to-morrows these gave their to-day.’
  • J. M. Edmonds, "For a British Graveyard in France" (4 July 1918)

• Yet for my sons I thank ye, gods! ’tis well;
  Well have they perish’d, for in fight they fell.
  Who dies in youth and vigour, dies the best,
  Struck through with wounds, all honest on the breast.
  • Homer, Iliad, XXII, spoken by Priam, as translated by Alexander Pope

• Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori:
  mors et fugacem persequitur virum
  nec parcit inbellis iuventae
  poplitibus timidove tergo.
  • What joy, for fatherland to die!
      Death's darts e'en flying feet o'ertake,
    Nor spare a recreant chivalry,
      A back that cowers, or loins that quake.
  • Horace, Odes, III, ii, 13, as translated by John Conington

• Much work for tears in many an English mother,
  Whose sons lie scattered on the bleeding ground;
  Many a widow’s husband groveling lies,
  Coldly embracing the discolor’d earth.
  • William Shakespeare, King John, act II, scene 1, French Herald

• And, like a troop of jolly huntsmen, come
  Our lusty English, all with purpled hands,
  Dyed in the dying slaughter of their foes.
  • William Shakespeare, King John, act II, scene 1, English Herald

• If the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp’d off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all, “We died at such a place”; some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument?
  • William Shakespeare, Henry V, act IV, scene 1, Williams

• Cowards die many times before their deaths;
  The valiant never taste of death but once.
  • William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, act II, scene 2, Caesar

• * Τεθνάμεναι γὰρ καλὸν ἐνὶ προμάχοισι πεσόντα
  ἄνδρ᾿ ἀγαθὸν περὶ ᾗ πατρίδι μαρνάμενον.
  • How glorious fall the valiant, sword in hand,
    In front of battle for their native land!
  • Tyrtaeus, Fragment 10, as translated by Thomas Campbell

• Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
    From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
  We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
    But we left him alone with his glory.
  • Charles Wolfe, "The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna" (1817), st. 8