Wounded in action

Wounded in action (WIA) describes combatants who have been wounded while fighting in a combat zone during wartime, but have not been killed.

Quotes

• Hast thou not seen my horsemen charge the foe,
  Shot through the arms, cut overthwart the hands,
  Dying their lances with their streaming blood,
  And yet at night carouse within my tent,
  Filling their empty veins with airy wine,
  That, being concocted, turns to crimson blood,
  And wilt thou shun the field for fear of wounds?
  • Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine, Part 2, Act 3, Scene 2

• At times he regarded the wounded soldiers in an envious way. He conceived persons with torn bodies to be peculiarly happy. He wished that he, too, had a wound, a red badge of courage.
  • Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Ch. 9

• Uxbridge: By God, sir, I've lost my leg!
  Wellington: By God, sir, so you have!
  • Lord Uxbridge's leg was shattered, probably by a piece of case shot, at the Battle of Waterloo, 18 June 1815. Reported by Geoffrey Reagan, Military Anecdotes (1992), p. 34, and in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. A different version of this exchange comes from the diary of J. W. Croker, a friend of Wellington, written on 8 December 1818, in which he recounts a conversation with Horace Seymour, the man who carried the wounded Uxbridge from the battlefield. Seymour recalled that when Uxbridge was hit he cried out "I have got it at last," to which the Duke of Wellington replied "No? Have you, by God?"