Awesome / Men at Arms

• A very quiet Moment of Awesome happens when everyone takes Vimes back to his room after he gets drunk and Angua notes how spartan the place is. She finds a book with a list of female names in it along with monetary figures. Her conclusion is that he spends all his money on loose women. Carrot very quietly, deliberately, and coldly corrects her. He's been giving almost half his pay to the widows and children of deceased coppers. Doubles as Moment of Awesome for Carrot too.
• When Carrot nails the villain to a stone pillar with his sword, and then cleanly pulls the sword from the stone (and the villain's body).
• One paragraph has become the page quote for Good Is Not Soft:
  If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you are going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat. They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the murder like another man will put off a good cigar. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.
• The Watch badly need permission to investigate the Fools' Guild and ask some questions. By city law, they cannot violate the Guild's sovereignty - their authority stops at the doors. Sergeant Colon explains this to Corporal Carrot and gives him a direct order - if Whiteface refuses to cooperate or asks him to leave, he must give in. Carrot accepts that order, and then demonstrates that he's not Stupid Good:
  Carrot (to the Chief Fool): I was given an order just before I came in here. If you do not comply, I will have no choice but to obey that order. Of course, I will do so with the greatest reluctance.
  Dr. Whiteface, appalled: Listen! If I shout, I can have a dozen men in here.
  Carrot: Believe me, that will only make it easier for me to obey.
  • "Sergeant Colon was lost in admiration. He'd seen people bluff on a bad hand, but he'd never seen anyone bluff with no cards."
• Carrot is eventually able to see through the Discworld's Weirdness Censor enough to recognize that Gaspode is actually talking to him and begins questioning the dog directly, eventually pressing him into finding a run-off Anqua. For a non-wizard this is almost unheard of and considering in a different short story Carrot will wind up interrogating Death himself as part of a murder investigation it would seem he held onto this ability to some extent.
• The "fridge scene", where Detritus went from the dumbest Troll in Ankh-Morpork to a friggin' supergenius.
  • Cuddy gets one for getting Detritus out of said fridge, and even going into Quarry Lane to hopefully find a troll doctor.
• Detritus's Roaring Rampage of Revenge / Big Damn Heroes moment at the end.
  "Detritus stood up. There was something about the way he did it, some hint of a mighty continent beginning a tectonic movement that would end in the fearsome creation of some unscalable mountain range, that made people stop and look. Not one of the watchers was familiar with the experience of mountain building, but now they had some vague idea of what it was like: it was like Detritus standing up, with Cuddy's twisted axe in his hand."
• Corporal Nobby Nobbs gets one simply by virtue of how terrifying he makes the thought of him wielding a Klatchian Fire Engine (which is essentially an honest to God flamethrower!). For a guy who is walking comic relief, the sheer pyromaniacal glee he displayed over the possiblitly of using that thing was legitimately scary, and considering Nobby is a pathetic kleptomanaic Plucky Comic Relief most of the time, that's pretty impressive.
  • That's nothing compared to the sheer amount of knowledge Nobby has about any form of weaponry. He did serve as Quartermaster one time but he sold all the weapons, resulting in them losing the war (and Nobby winning as he joins the winning side).
  • Isn't it arguable that Nobby's real Moment of Awesome is actually getting ahold of that armory in the first place? He uses his impressive shameless manipulation and crooked knowledge of regulations to mount one hell of a Bavarian Fire Drill.
• Practically invoked by Vimes himself via inner monologue ("He'd like to take this moment and press it in a big book so he could look at it later") when he lets drop to Dr Cruces that the reason why he's acting like he owns the place is because he does.
• Also arguably later as Vimes is wrestling with the Gonne and it goes off, hitting the ceiling, and he responds to assassins crying "who are you"—
  Vimes: The LAW, you sons of bitches!
• Vimes puts the gonne down...
  • And then Carrot picks it up, says "It's only a device", and smashes it against the wall.
• One of the running gags is Detritus's trouble with saluting—each time he does it, he knocks himself out. At one point, he and Lance-Constable Cuddy are escalating into a fight, while Carrot's trying to calm a group of dwarfs and a group of trolls. When he finds out his message of peace and tolerance is being undermined by Detritus bouncing Cuddy on the ground while Cuddy bites his leg, he realizes that he can't discipline them separately without re-inciting the riot. So what does he do? Order Detritus to salute, knocking him and Cuddy out at once.
• Gaspode's moment with Big Fido, whose ideas and doctrine are somewhat straight out of Mein Kampf and who has the strays of the city completely under his thumb. Fido orders his wolf-pack-cum-killing-machine to attack Gaspode, at which point Gaspode, a tiny, scruffy terrier with every doggy disease possible (and some native only to sheep), defeats them single-pawedly:
  Dogs leapt.
  “SIT!” said Gaspode, in passable human.
  The command bounced back and forth around the alley, and fifty per cent of the animals obeyed. In most cases, it was the hind fifty per cent. Dogs in mid-spring found their treacherous legs coiling under them—
  “BAD DOG!”
  —and this was followed by an overpowering sense of racial shame that made them cringe automatically, a bad move in mid-air.
  Gaspode glanced up at Angua as bewildered dogs rained around them. “I said I got the Power, didn't I?” he said. “Now run!"
• The full scene homage to For a Few Dollars More at the climax. Vimes' retirement watch even seems to be playing the same tune, if you read the bings out loud. Which is also one itself, that Pterry managed to accurately reproduce a song in text using nothing but italicized bings.
• Death's Visit with Big Fido. Also counts as a Funny Moment.
  Death: Big Fido?
  Big Fido: Yes?
  Death: Heel.
• Detritus discovering his role as Drill Sergeant Nasty and managing to turn a crew of twenty odd Trolls, Dwarfs and a few odd humans into a police force with some shouting.
• When a massive riot breaks out over the Day Watch arresting the wrong troll, Carrot patiently waits until one of the Day Watchmen drops by and gives Carrot enough proof to show order has broken down, allowing him to form the Night Watch (who were recently dismissed) into a militia. He then proceeds to awesome his way up and down the street, recruiting trolls and dwarfs into the watch simply by using their own animosity towards each other to both get them in and keep them in the watch and successfully restores order, while also figuring out how The Gonne was stolen.
  • Also during that when Captain Quirke of the Day Watch tries to stop them, Carrot calmly asks him what evidence he had of Coalface, the troll who's wrongful arrest started this whole mess, Quirke's defense boils down to "He was a Troll, I needed no bleeding reason to arrest him other than that" Carrot calmly responds by decking him and then getting back to work like nothing happened.
    • After spending a few moments worrying if he used "minimal necessary force". In Colon's words: "Is he still breathing? [...] Seems sufficently minimal to me, sir".
• Carrot's meeting with Lord Vetinari, which doubles as a Funny Moment, as they discuss new arrangements for the Watch, Carrot's lack of desire for the throne, and conspire to promote Vimes to Sir Samuel Vimes, Commander of the Watch.
  They exchanged glances. The Patrician got the best of the bargain, since Carrot's face was bigger. Both of them were trying not to grin.
• Really, the whole book is an escalating series of Moments of Awesome for Carrot.
• Cuddy is upset that his axe has been broken after his death, bemoaning to Death that he won't have a suitable weapon for his trip to the afterlife, and insists he won't go until he gets one. At the end of the book, he's buried with the remains of the Gonne. How's that, Cuddy?
• It may take some Fridge Logic to notice, but Vetinari's reaction - or lack thereof - to being shot with a weapon completely outside the Disc's Fantasy Gun Control context is pretty awesome. There is no flicker of response whatsoever to what must be searing pain; the only changes in Vetinari's behavior are from the disorientation of massive blood loss. Surviving the wound at all is a feat considering the medieval standards of medical care in Ankh-Morpork, and remaining a formidable Handicapped Badass even more so.

---