By working with veterans, survivors, citizens and artists, we turn complex and often violent experiences into a collective memory and cultural response to the things that we have had to bear witness to. Beginning to reconcile and embrace how conflicts have shaped our lives and where our responsibilities lie is a mountainous task enabled by the collaboration of many people. Often our cultural memory of war tells us to keep quiet about the aspects that are most challenging to our ethics, to forget the violations we feel and tremors that keep us distant and numb. If we begin to face and speak and create from these human aftermaths, we begin to learn that we are not alone ...rather closer to coming home than we ever thought.

—from the forward, The New Citizen Army