"Walking Wounded” is a work of short fiction by Irwin Shaw, originally appearing in The New Yorker on May 13, 1944, and first collected in Act of Faith and Other Stories (1946) by Random House.
[3] “Walking Wounded” is “probably Shaw’s most famous war story.”[4] The story is told from a third-person limited omniscient.
He has been exempt from field duty and assigned to a desk job after being “medically graded” (unfit for fighting).
Celibate for three years in deference to his young wife, he reserves a special contempt for British women, who he believes are exploiting their war-zone advantages where females are at a premium.
On a date with a young British woman named Joyce, Peter disgorges all his insecurities related to his long separation from Anne.
Peter flees to a bar reserved for commissioned officers where he proceeds to engage in friendly drunken banter with some South African and American aviators.
[5] Biographer Michael Shnayerson reports that Stars & Stripes reproduced a key passage from the story in 1944 in which the protagonist, Peter, in conversation with his bemused comrade Mac, issues a diatribe directed at European and American women in war zones: I hate these women out here.
A man has to sacrifice all decent, male pride to chase after one of these…They demand abasement, homage, the ugliest, most horrible and meanest of them.