Of Courage, War and Death!

What inspires ordinary men/women to pull off those extraordinary feats!
A visit to the war memorial brings alive this and many such questions. Those young men on the wall, all so promising, each one with their own story of hugging death. Some choose to call it courage some choose to call it foolishness, I can only wonder what made them do what they did. Probably it was a belief that their life was serving a bigger purpose, probably it was faith in the idea of a nation instilled from childhood, probably the idea that they were serving the greater good. Whether it is the purpose or faith, it was so because they chose to define it so.
For one who denies faith, it would only seem as an act of foolishness. Looking at the other side of the coin, while there are people who get killed in the war and become martyrs for a nation, they also become the murderers in view of the opposite side. Probably not just in the eyes of the enemy but even in the eyes of the people for who they claim to fight, in the eyes of citizens who have lost their lives as collateral damage. The thousands of rapes and lives in Kashmir, the atrocities in North East, the list only goes on. The question again remains, what makes ordinary men/women commit extraordinary inhuman acts!
War and military is natural to human nature, some people argue. In the evolution, human beings needed to protect the limited resources they had and that is how armies originated, they say. Well they might have originated that way, but it somehow seems stupid that more than a million rupees is spent to protect a piece of ice which would be of no use to anyone. Whether a piece of land/sea is under the control of X or Y, the color of the land would remain the same, the texture would remain the same, the people would continue to live the way they always did, the wind would flow the way it always did, if undisturbed it definitely wouldn't matter whether that piece belonged to X or Y or is left as a no identity land. Well why then do we continue to behave the way we do.
If tomorrow all of us decide to have no countries, then would the "sacrifices" made by these men go waste or would they actually be fruitful because there would be no further loss of life. Or would we continue to fight, just to keep the sacrifices relevant. If there was life after death, would these men who have actually given up their lives for what they believed the just cause, still feel they have done the right thing. In the world of fluid identities, would they still feel it made sense to die an idea, would they think their death or life for that matter was worth or would they think it was a foolish step, would they think they are being honored or would they think their life has become a posterity sake.
Death is honored when for a cause. One dies for an abstract idea of a nation, one would be called a martyr, one dies to help a cause, one would be called a hero, one dies for a purpose, one would be called an enlightened soul, but one dies for the lack of purpose, why would one be called a coward. We live in a strange world!