I had a dwarf that started as a dabbling cheese maker. I put him in a suicide squad and sent it into the face of an ambush as bait. Suprisingly, the squad won and he was the only one left. When I looked at the combat log I found that he had killed 3/4 of the goblins. With his bare hands. I appointed him to a regular job (Stoneworker or something), then went on as normal. After a few more sieges I tried to make a magma trap. As is always happens, while I was building the trap another siege came along. With no major trap, my small dedicated military was easily overwhelmed. I assigned the rest of my dwarves to pick up weapons and retreat to the throne room. When the siege came in I attacked. They survived, but I had 13 or so dwarves left. All of them had major injuries, from broken bones to alive through being gutted. As I recall he was somewhere in between.
Only 5 of them survived after that. He was one of the remaining five. My first reaction was to wall off the fort completely and wait for the next migration. Unluckily, due to my RPing, my king was safe inside his private room. As a typical noble, he decided it would be nice to pull the lever that controlled the pumps in my water trap. The whole fort was flooded, save a few rooms that were either above the entrance or doored off. He was the only one alive, and by extreme luck, in one of the rooms that was dry and with a pick and . I dug him out and started over, practically. Long story short, he became the subject of many engravings, a legendary warrior (Through danger rooms, of course), a king, and a general hero.
The rest of the forts life was dedicated to making a badass tomb for him, with gold, booze, pointy things, pointy things made of candy, and anything shiny. He died fighting off a siege.