Building on earlier work that aimed to understand the traumatogenic effects of war experiences on soldiers, Chaim Shatan (1989) introduces in “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” his conception of “eroticized violence.” He provides examples from his work with soldiers that are at once lurid and disturbing, yet also elliptical. These examples by their excess reflect the (micro)traumatic impact of Shatan’s years of listening to soldiers’ accounts of their war experiences, now inflicted on the reader. A reflection of his era, Shatan’s difficulty conceiving of homosexuality and its interimplication with gender limits his understanding of the material he presents, a lack I attempt to remediate by recourse to Laplanche’s work on enigmatic transfer.