Truth

One of the overriding themes in "In the Shadow of War" is truth and the absence of it. On more than one occasion, Omovo is dishonest. First, he does not tell the soldiers his real name. Second, he lies when he tells them that he has not seen the woman in the veil. The fact that Omovo has the propensity to lie and that his initial perceptions are sometimes proved wrong, as with the corpses that he at first believes are capsized canoes, makes it possible to read his account of the events in the forest as somehow less than true. Another way to read Omovo's dishonesty, however, is that he is acting morally by protecting the woman in the veil. The narrator in the story makes the claim that Omovo is listening to things on the radio about the war that he does not necessarily understand; however...