I'm not sure if this is how it's supposed to be, but this is how it's working for me in my current ~4,000,000☼ fortress of ~130 dwarves.
Currently I send one founding dwarf out to kill goblin sieges or ambushes.
She is a legendary manager, a legendary bookkeeper, a legendary appraiser, a legendary engraver, a legendary wrestler, a legendary shield user, a legendary armor user, and a legendary swordsdwarf.
She is ultra-mighty, perfectly agile, and superdwarvenly-tough.
She is in masterfully made steel platemail and masterfully made steel greaves. The rest of her armor is masterfully made from iron. (Steel is very precious on this map as there no flux with which to make it. The only sources of steel are the steel objects bought from the dwarven caravan, including toys and musical instruments. These are melted down for a minuscule return of usable steel.)
She carries a masterfully made steel shield and a masterfully made obsidian shortsword.
Her record so far is to personally defeat four sixteen-man squads of goblins. She engaged two of these and a good portion of a third simultaneously. (It was a five-squad siege, but one of the squads was nearly wiped out by stabby, stabby traps at pinch-points, and fled the field without seeing a single dwarf.)
Goblins frequently go airborne when she hits them. Sometimes she seems to chase them while they're flying, because they aren't dead or unconscious yet. If the hit doesn't kill them or knock them out, the landing usually does. If a goblin passes out she leaves them alone until all conscious goblins are dealt with, then she goes back through and knocks limp bodies around until they're all dead.
I recently saw her hit a goblin so hard I had to scroll (vertically) through two screens to see where it ran into a rock wall. When I arrived, various chunks of goblin were skittering back away from the impact sight in a grizzly example of splashing mechanics. One of those chunks was the goblin's head which, appropriately, left the best bloody smear as it tumbled across the ground.
Bitch is mean. And there are ten more dwarves who are almost as good as she is.
Her thoguths reveal that her lover was one of the other founders; he died in an early goblin raid. they also show that she has had a number of war dogs as pets; she only has one, now Soldiers seems to be one of the few professions that build social bonds while working, since they work with other dwarves while sparring. Numbered among her friends are more than a dozen dead dwarves.
The description of her personality ends with this line: "She doesn't really care about anything, anymore."