A dream in three parts, shown out of chronological order.
I. Penitence
There had been a great and terrible world war, one that had involved every nation. Everyone had fought in it; uncountable tens or even hundreds of millions had died. Eventually, the war had been brought to an end-- not by the governments, corporations, or religious leaders of the world, but by the organized crime syndicates. The mafia, tong, yakuza, etc. had worked together to overthrow all the other institutions and take overt control of the world, just so that the war would stop.
Now that it was over, it had been decided that there must be some symbolic gesture, both as apology for making such a mess of the world and to avoid such a thing ever happening again: every man on the planet would cut off his own left pinky. No women were going to have to-- not because they hadn't been involved in the horrors of the war as well, just because organized crime is chauvinistic in nature. This was going to be the ultimate male bonding thing-- we were all going to pay the same price, even the criminal bosses.
So I was standing in line in a sort of factory, one of thousands of facilities that had been set up for this ritual to happen in. There was a huge line of us threading our way in and through the building; through some clever arrangement, I think, everyone knew the man in front of and behind him, which I guess was going to enhance the bonding element of the whole thing. I don't remember who was in front and behind me, just that I knew them.
The friend in front of me tried to move further back in line, a few places back, and wouldn't listen when I tried to explain how futile that was. "If if you do move a little further back, you're just going to keep your pinky another minute or two-- you can't delay forever." He was determined to try.
The friend behind me had some other angle. Somehow he was going to try to fake it, though I didn't understand the mechanism to do so-- something involving a plate that he had smuggled in, and fake blood. Again, he wouldn't listen when I tried to explain the futility of this. If every adult male on the planet has no pinky, he's going to stand out like a sore, well, pinky. Not to mention the fact that the people operating the facility were not stupid, and they'd probably already seen thousands of attempts to evade the process.
No, I figured the best thing to do was to get through this line as quickly as possible, I couldn't get through this line fast enough. Get up there, take the knife, take my pinky off as quickly and silently as I could, and be glad that this was the extent of the punishment.
II. History
Years later, I was sitting in the library of a large, old house, reading from a book. I hardly even thought about my missing pinky anymore. I was reading to someone else, family or something. It said it was a book about Middle Earth and I'd started reading out of some sort of hobbit-curiosity, but it had turned out to be about the war, a comparison between the elements of Tolkien and the real events that had happened. As I read about it I couldn't help but remember fighting in the war...
III. Memory
I had apparently been a fighter pilot, and all the flying and dogfighting was in WWII-era aircraft. Really, it seemed like it was WWII, because we were fighting the Japanese. We were dogfighting above the ocean, near a Japanese island. It was like fish schooling, moving around in packs, eating and being eaten: flying along with a few of my American peers, then seeing a lone Japanese plane down below us, so I'd break off and dive and run bullets all over the top of his canopy and fuselage and he'd burst into flames, and then I'd look around for another school of American planes to join. Sometimes we'd be going along and a big Japanese fighter-bomber would lay into us and we'd scatter in all directions. The whole time, there was a complete lack of emotional involvement or careful thought; it was literally like a bunch of fish just swimming around preying and being preyed upon, thousands of us in packs and schools and ones and twos, back and forth.
Eventually, I got shot up a bunch and my controls were damaged-- I could only go down, not back up, so I knew I had a limited amount of time remaining in the air. So instead of dogfighting planes, I went down and started attacking ground targets on the island. And again, there was a tremendous emotional distance between me and what was going on-- I'd see some buildings and a bunch of people running around, and I'd open fire and before I even saw what the gunfire was doing to the targets I'd have passed overhead, over and past. I had no idea what was happening to them, whether I was hitting anything or not. In fact, eventually, I wasn't even sure what these targets were-- was that a hospital I just shot all up? I think maybe I saw a red cross on it... Well, it's too late now, I'm already past it. Here's something else to shoot, a bunch of little people running around. Huh. Was that a school? They looked awfully small... but they're Japanese, so they're probably short, right? And I'm up in the air so everyone looks small, even tall people. Was that a school? I'll never know, and besides, I'm going to crash hard in a few minutes anyway, 'cause I can only go lower, not higher. As I watched the ground coming up at me, and I was thinking about the stuff I'd been shooting up, I found myself wondering if this is how most war crimes happen-- too fast to avoid, too emotionally detatched to refuse, you think you're doing one thing and later on it turns out it was something else entirely...