Consider Chris Hedges' "War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" (2002), which examines the way that War creates (or perhaps comprises) a culture of its own, and acts as a transformative experience that has little if any civilian analogue.

The work is flawed, and I believe one passage had a disputed claim of plagiarism, but this work still explores these issues better than I have seen elsewhere.

Michael Herr's Dispatches probably comes the closest.