With Custer on the Little Bighorn By William O. Taylor Viking, $27.95 Marching to Valhalla By Michael Blake Villard, $23 Four events in American history float outside of time, especially immune to factual accounting: two presidential assassinations, those of Lincoln and JFK, and two war calamities, Pearl Harbor and the Battle of the Little Bighorn -- often called the Custer Massacre. Every citizen has highly personalized opinions about at least one of these events, and the impossibility of resolving them is the engine of their survival. For about a decade or so, the Custer Myth has been undergoing one of its periodic swings. Curlylocks is back, and he's proud again. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, invariably called "General," bounded onto the public stage, never to leave, on July 6, 1876, when it became international news that on June 25, he and more than 200 of his men had been wiped out by hostile Indians. With no white survivors to contradict it, the legend of Custer's Last Stand took hold, and he became the final cavalryman to fall, waving his saber. (There's no evidence he was the final fatality, and he hadn't carried a sword in ages.) Custer was already the most renowned Indian fighter in the West, but this was fame to die for. Those who are not Custer buffs can rarely name anyone else killed that day, and the singular focus on the fallen charismatic leader is sadly telling. Many folks were there and lived, after all. A surprising number of Indians, as well as whites who fought simultaneously with other commanders nearby, have left memoirs of the Little Bighorn, though the publication of a new first-person account is particularly sensational after all these years. Plus, everything about William O. Taylor's "With Custer on the Little Bighorn" suggests he was a stouthearted and clear-eyed soldier as well as a vigorous writer. Private Taylor was not exactly with Custer on the Little Bighorn, of course, but part of the battalion Custer sent off to attack the huge encampment of Cheyenne and Sioux from a different direction. Taylor's commander was Major Marcus Reno, a besotted window-peeper who inspired little confidence from his men or Custer. Taylor's narrative shows a genteel, 19th-century restraint that takes some getting used to. He conveys his disgust with Reno simply by noting that he did see the Major drink some amber fluid from a bottle right before the initial charge, and well, it certainly wasn't water, anyway. Next page: Eyewitness to terror