Regardless of political affiliations, Custer was given the choice appointment to the class of 1909. Custer said later that he did very well in certain classes, chose to sleep through others, which gave him his standing near the bottom of his class. This is untrue-allof Custer's grades were uniformly low. He preferred his friends and pranks to his studies, and was generally popular.

At this point, he met what I consider the biggest influence in his life, the now utterly forgotten George Smith Patton, Jr.

Patton, four years older than Custer, was everything George was not. He was from an enormously rich California family, and seemed half centaur, with his string of polo ponies and race horses. He was also most reserved, again the opposite of Custer.

It was said that Patton already had the chill eye of a general, a man who could dispatch men to death without a qualm. Such might have been the case but, like many other officers who die young, that quality was never to be shown.

Custer and Patton made an ideal partnership, each having virtues the other did not, although book studies couldn't be considered a prime virtue for either of them. When they chose to work hard at something, they did very well. But mostly they did not, at least not in what the Academy considered productive. One such time-waster was their swearing competition, each trying to come up with the most colorful and obscene set of oaths. Custer told me that before that began, "I was one of the cleanest-mouthed boys in America. Afterwards… " He shook his head, then brightened. "But it surely stood me in good stead when I was dealing with those mule skinners when we were after Pancho Villa."

Patton had already been dropped a class for failing mathematics in his plebe year. But somehow the pair struggled through the Academy, and were given their lieutenants' bars in 1909. They were both commissioned into the glamorous cavalry, in spite of their low standings. Neither, in spite of accusations and sometimes boasts, was the lowest graduate, the so-called "goat."

They were posted to different regiments, but kept their correspondence fresh. Both men wrote long letters, to each other and, later, to their fiancees and then wives.

Custer took leave twice in Washington, seeking a better assignment than the dusty Western posts he was sent to.

Patton also took leaves, to play polo and, in 1912, to compete in the Stockholm Olympics, in the modern pentathlon, placing a very respectable fourth.

The beginning of the Great War found both of them, like most career soldiers, champing to see combat, worried that somehow the Allies would defeat Germany before they would have a chance at action.

But then revolutionary Mexico surprised everyone. General John J. Pershing, after assorted border outrages by the sometimes-bandit, sometimes-soldier Pancho Villa, took 10,000 men, mostly cavalry, across the border.

Patton's unit managed to trap one of Villa's main generals, General Julio Cardenas, and Patton supposedly killed Cardenas. Or so the story has it.

Custer, on the other hand, claimed that a column he led came "close, very damned close" to Villa himself, even though none of the reports from Pershing's expedition mention it. In any event, Pershing retired back into the United States in a bit under a year, the Mexicans probably chastened a bit if hardly defeated in detail.

Then came the real war, and both men went to France. Patton was an aide to Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, while Custer was assigned to a troop of the Second US Cavalry. Patton asked Pershing for a combat assignment, and was put in charge of the first American tank brigade, as a lieutenant colonel.

He looked up his friend, and told him that horses were doomed. Unless Custer wanted to spend his war like the British cavalry, eternally waiting for a breakthrough in the trenches, he'd go with Patton.

Custer refused.

He told me three times, late, in his quarters, after he'd been drinking, that this was "the biggest damned fool mistake I ever made, and thank God he gave me a chance to change things."

This, by the way, brings up another of Custer's meaningless prevarications. He claimed that he'd gotten drunk once, when a young lieutenant, made an ass of himself, and never touched alcohol again. He was, indeed, piously temperate among civilians and politicians, but would have three or four whiskey-and-waters in the officer's club, although I never saw him more than mildly intoxicated. Why he bothered to tell this lie, other than to further set himself apart in a hard-drinking Army, is beyond me.

At any rate, Patton went on to have "a hell of a war," as Custer described it, gaining respect, medals and recognition. He was badly wounded in the battle of Meuse-Argonne. Custer claimed he visited him in the hospital, just as the great influenza epidemic was beginning.

Patton realized he was dying and, again according to Custer, made him swear to pick up the torch of the newly invented tanks and bring the Army into the Twentieth Century.

Custer, like most liars, couldn't leave well enough alone, and told me he was one of the casket bearers at Patton's funeral. Some years after the Second World War, I happened to see an old photograph of the pallbearers as they carried Patton's casket onto the transport that would take his corpse back to the United States. George Armstrong Custer was not one of them.

His oath to Patton is also suspect because, with the war's end, the tanks were given to the infantry, and Custer, rather than go with them, chose to return to the horse cavalry.

Custer's service between the wars was somewhat undistinguished, although he gained a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. Unfortunately, all too often the fools he wouldn't suffer were his commanding officers or post commanders, and he was constantly in trouble.

However, he saved his career by becoming an intensely political officer, making close friends with high-ranking Republican politicians, or at least as much as a soldier and a politician can be friends.

Needless to say, this did not endear him greatly to his fellow officers. But in the tiny peacetime Army, one learned to keep one's mouth shut, particularly as the Depression roared around the gates of the camps, and the advantages of a civilian career looked very bleak.

Then Custer was chosen for his first staff post, and his behavior changed. Now there was no one smoother, more ready with a colorful story of what it was like "out in the field," or to agree with a superior's opinions. Custer was now considered a man who was headed for the top.

There were also murmurs from his conservative political friends that anyone this handsome and well-spoken might, in time, make an interesting senator or representative.

He married well, to the beautiful and flamboyant Reynolds-tobacco widow Libby Holman. But she was hardly the perfect Army wife, especially in those days, with her loud espousal of such causes, radical to the military, as civil rights, black music and the arts. Their relationship has been written about extensively, particularly considering Holman's suicide in the late 1940s, and I feel no need to invade their privacy, in my speculations, since I never met Libby. I do wonder, if Custer had lived through the war, if the marriage would have survived, given the different directions their lives would almost certainly have taken.

In late 1939, with war again ravaging Europe, Colonel Custer was given a battalion of tanks, although half of them were no more than trucks with signs proclaiming their tracked status.

Then came the huge 1940 war games, in Louisiana, that ended some officers' careers and made others. Custer had been commanded to hold a flanking position for an infantry division's attack. Instead, he led his «tanks» in a long, looping maneuver around the "enemy," and romped through the rear lines, bringing havoc.