With my first semi-successful military, things were going well. Not a were set foot on my map ere it was brutally reminded of how my embark party missed their dearly-departed leader. A caravan showed, I posted my macedwarf squad, and a kobold tripped over a kitten. One of the macedwarves caught it, only to produce this three-line disgrace of undwarfyness: Kobold is charged. Kobold dodges. Kobold strike the macedwarf in the head! The severed part flies off in an arc!
In a way, I was thankful to that kobold for culling the unworthy from my fort... but not so thankful I'd call the rest of the squad off.
The only other memorable fight I've had (that didn't involve a legendary miner) was that of a migrant whose wave showed up in the middle of a siege. One migrant was a High Master smith and I decided it was triage time. The migrants were drafted and some were sent to distract the siegers; the ones with skills I wanted, I tried to herd/micromanage in the opposite direction. Then I noticed the corpses. An unarmed farmer had wrestled to death an iron-clad goblin. And he didn't just luck out by punching its brain in; he dismembered it over pages of combat. Limbs strewn about and everything. He did the same to a wolf, and was happily mutilating yet another wolf ("just gigantic with incredible muscles") before I even noticed the gob corpse. He had a bruised arm or something that healed up before he stopped flashing the migrant X.
The militia captain was quite willing to overlook her new recruit's lack of metallurgic skill.