General Musso giving a Venezuelan Smug SnakeGeneral Ripper a “The Reason You Suck” Speech and making him back down with a nuclear missile warning shot (detonated early twenty miles from the coast of the capital) is one of the more satisfying moments of the first book.
Jed, Barney, and Kipper organizing a march of citizens demanding their force be heard by the constitutional convention delegates interested in Putting on the Reich, which also leaves borderline fascist of the insufferable but Well-Intentioned Extremist variety General Blackstone in a rare panic.
General Musso at Guantanamo Bay and Admiral Ritchie in Hawaii don't appear as much as some of the other P.O.V. characters but have some affecting and impressive Reasonable Authority Figure and The Chains of Commanding moments.
Jed Culver, the lawyer who ends up working with the authorities in Hawaii and later Seattle to help establish continuity of government, is quite popular for being a Hyper-Competent Sidekick who provides one of the few views of surviving vacationers from the continental U.S. (not to mention civilian survivors not caught up too much in Apocalypse Anarchy no matter where they are) throughout the original book.
There are no P.O.V. characters in Alaska (despite its status as one of the only three surviving states, and an interesting one at that) or the surviving parts of Canada in the first book, despite how many people would have preferred seeing what was going on in those regions to some of the plotlines that did get included.
General Musso managing to form an alliance between the Americans at Guantanamo Bay and Cuban military remnants, hosting scientists studying the edge of the wave, sorting through what to do with the detainees at the base, and fighting Venezuelan invaders had a lot of fun potential to be the main plot line, but is mostly concentrated in the beginning, with that plotline only being in five of the last forty chapters (in a book with fifty chapters) and the interesting main Cuban character getting an early Dropped a Bridge on Him fate.
The Bubble wiping out everyone in the area it envelopes, even those people in planes in the air, feels like a wasted opportunity when all those planes surviving and scrambling to land safely and then find a place for their passengers to go could have been a great plotline. For that matter, sparing islands not physically part of the continental United States but right off-shore, like Manhattan and the Maine and California coastal islands, could have also led to some interesting P.O.V.s and good new twists of people trying to survive in those locations and adding their voice to forming a new government out of only a few states.
The Woobie: Monique, The Watson from the France plotline, is an Innocent Bystander who spends her page time being dragged through intense spy danger while her country falls apart around her and her friends and boyfriend are all killed in front of her or exposed as Creepy Good spies or cold-blooded terrorists manipulating her. Then she gets killed without accomplishing much.