My mother, God rest her, didn’t approve of profanity or any such talk; she called it “the language of the ignorant.” This did not, however, keep her from yelling “Oh shit!” if she burned the roast or nailed her thumb a good one while hammering a picture-hook in the wall. Nor does it preclude most people, Christian as well as heathen, from saying something similar (or even stronger) when the dog barfs on the shag carpet or the car slips off the jack. It’s important to tell the truth; so much depends upon it, as William Carlos Williams almost said when he was writing about that red wheelbarrow. The Legion of Decency might not like the word shit, and you might not like it much, either, but sometimes you’re just stuck with it - no kid ever ran to his mother and said that his little sister just defecated in the tub. I suppose he might say pushed or went woowoo, but took a shit is, I fear, very much in the ballpark.

You must tell the truth if your dialogue is to have the resonance and realism that Hart’s War, good story though it is, so sadly lacks - and that holds true all the way down to what folks say when they hit their thumb with the hammer. If you substitute “Oh sugar!” for “Oh shit!” because you’re thinking about the Legion of Decency, you are breaking the unspoken contract that exists between writer and reader - your promise to express the truth of how people talk and act through the medium of a made-up story.