No Gun Ri Massacre

The No Gun Ri Massacre occurred on July 26–29, 1950, early in the Korean War, when an undetermined number of South Korean refugees were killed by the 2nd Battalion, 7th U.S. Cavalry Regiment (and a U.S. air attack) at a railroad bridge near the village of No Gun Ri, 100 mi southeast of Seoul. Estimates of the dead have ranged from dozens to 500. In 2005, a South Korean government report listed 163 dead or missing and 55 wounded and added that many other victims' names were not reported. The U.S. Army cites the number of casualties as "unknown".

The massacre allegations were little known outside Korea until the publication of a series of controversial  Associated Press (AP) reports in 1999 containing interviews with 7th Cavalry veterans some of whom corroborated Korean survivors' accounts. The AP also uncovered orders to fire on refugees approaching US positions because of the KPA's use of these groups to cloak troop and guerrilla movements. Based on interviews with surviving US veterans and aerial reconnaissance footage taken shortly after the event, The Pentagon conducted an investigation and, in 2001, concluded the three-day event was "an unfortunate tragedy inherent to war and not a deliberate killing", rejecting survivors' demands for an apology and compensation.

South Korean investigators disagreed with Pentagon findings, saying they believed 7th Cavalry troops were ordered to fire on the refugees. The survivors' group called the U.S. report a "whitewash". Additional archival documents later emerged showing U.S. commanders authorizing the use of lethal force against refugees during this period, declassified documents found but not disclosed by the Pentagon investigators. Among them was a report by the U.S. ambassador in South Korea in July 1950 that the U.S. military had adopted a theater-wide policy of firing on approaching refugee groups based on the KPA’s infiltration of refugees during the battle of Taejon. Despite demands, the U.S. investigation was not reopened. A South Korean excavation of the site in 2007 found no bones or other remains and aerial footage taken 11 days after the event showed no signs of mass graves or dead bodies.

Prompted by the exposure of No Gun Ri, survivors of similar alleged incidents in 1950–1951 filed reports with the Seoul government. In 2008 an investigative commission said more than 200 cases of alleged large-scale civilian killings by the U.S. military had been registered, mostly air attacks.

Background


The division of Japan's former Korean colony into two zones at the end of World War II led to years of border skirmishing between U.S.-allied South Korea and Soviet-allied North Korea. On June 25, 1950, the North Korean army invaded the south to try to reunify the peninsula, touching off a war that would draw in both the U.S. and Chinese militaries and end in an armistice and stalemate three years later.

The U.S. dispatched occupation forces from Japan to fight alongside the South Korean army. These green American troops were insufficiently trained, poorly equipped and often led by inexperienced officers and NCO’s. In particular, they lacked training in how to deal with war-displaced civilians. In the two weeks after the Americans first arrived on July 5, 1950, the U.S. Army estimated that 380,000 South Korean civilians fled south, passing through U.S. and South Korean lines, as the defending forces reeled in retreat.

With large gaps in their front lines and refugees fleeing the onrush of the North Korean advance, the Americans were sometimes attacked from behind, and reports spread that disguised North Korean soldiers were infiltrating south with refugee columns, a continuing concern throughout the war's first year. An official 25th ID war diary describes the refugee predicament they were faced with in the early days of the war:

"No one desired to shoot innocent people, but many of the innocent-looking refugees dressed in the traditional white clothes of the Koreans turned out to be North Korean soldiers transporting ammunition and heavy weapons in farm wagons and carrying military equipment in packs on their backs. They were observed many times changing from uniforms to civilian clothing and back into uniform. There were so many refugees that it was impossible to screen and search them all"

During the Battle of Chochiwon in early July, 1950, North Korean infiltration teams provided accurate and detailed information on the location and strength of the 21st Infantry's 3rd battalion providing the KPA with the intelligence needed to perform a coordinated assault, quickly routing the 3-21 from its positions. Again during the Battle of Taejon later in mid July, hundreds of North Korean soldiers, many dressed in white to disguise themselves as refugees, infiltrated behind the 24th Infantry Division and played a crucial role in the defeat of the 24th at Taejon resulting in the capture of General William Dean the conflict's highest ranking prisoner of war. Two days before the incident at No Gun Ri, a company from the 8th U.S. Cavalry Regiment was reportedly attacked by North Korean irregulars who infiltrated a crowd of refugees west of Yongdong. These infiltrators also established a roadblock behind the 8th Cavarly’s position, cutting them off from the rest of the American forces, wounding the Battalion’s commanding officer, and attacking rear echelon field artillery units supporting the rescue effort of the trapped 8th Cav soldiers. Adding to this confusing situation, a July 23, 1950 Eighth United States Army intelligence report stated almost all refugees were searched over one 24-hour period on the main road and none was found carrying arms or uniforms. But three days later Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gay, 1st Cavalry Division commander, told rear-echelon reporters he suspected most of the refugee movement towards the US defensive positions were North Korean infiltrators.

Events of 25–29 July 1950
As North Korean forces seized the central South Korean town of Yongdong on July 25, 1950, 1st Cavalry Division troops began evacuating villages in front of the enemy advance, including hundreds of residents of Chu Gok Ri and Im Ke Ri. As they headed down the main road south, they were joined by other refugees. That first night the refuges were ordered to camp on a riverbank near the town of Ha Ga Ri. Several refugees were killed that first evening. and accounts differ as to why there were casualties among the refugees that first night. According to some Korean survivors, American soldiers shot several refugees as they strayed from a roadside assembly area or ignored instructions to remain in place. Other Survivors recall refugees being injured in the crossfire between the advancing KPA and defending US forces.

The next day, July 26, the refugees awoke to find most of the US soldiers had left the positions they held the night before. The refugee column then proceeded towards the No Gun Ri area, 5 mi from their homes, when they arrived at a U.S. roadblock, were searched for weapons or contraband and made to move to the parallel railroad tracks to clear the road for vehicle traffic. Survivors said the US troops who searched them radioed to overhead warplanes to attack the refugee group. In a 2007 German television documentary Yang Hae-chan described the air attack: "Suddenly bombers flew over and opened fire without warning. They came back again and again firing at us. Chaos broke out among the refugees. We ran around wildly trying to get away. But in that first attack very many people were hit and killed." Due to the lack of a Tactical Air Control Party (TACP) assigned to the regiment, it was deemed highly improbable by both investigation teams that the soldiers who searched the civilians called in this airstrike as they lacked the technical capability to do so.

An explanation for the refugee strafing was never confirmed by investigators. While several of the US veterans stated that airstrikes were occurring in the valley out of their line of site and many Korean refugees recalled an attack from the air that day, no flight logs or action summaries from any air assets operating in or around the No Gun Ri area reported an attack of this type in this area. With aircraft flying too fast to accurately make a positive identification on a target and with a shortage of TACP’s, friendly fire was always a concern; earlier on the 26th the 1st Battalion of the 7th Cavalry’s regimental command post was attacked by a F-80  and the strafing of the refugees was dangerously close to US forces.

Early on the 25th the 2nd battalion of the 7th cavalry regiment broke ranks, abandoned its equipment and began a disorganized easterly retreat away from Yongdong believing they were being enveloped by the KPA. Beginning that evening and continuing through the early hours of the 27th, the 2/7 was reorganized by Major William Witherspoon the regimental operations officer and ordered to dig in on a ridgeline just east of and overlooking No Gun Ri in a position adjacent to the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry.

According to the South Korean government’s investigation, over the course of the next three days, dug-in troops of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry, opened fire on the refugees, some of whom took shelter in a low, narrow culvert beneath the railroad embankment. The small arms and mortar fire forced them into a larger double tunnel beneath a railroad bridge. Survivor Park Sun-yong said corpses were piled up as shields against the gunfire: "Children were screaming in fear and the adults were praying for their lives, and the whole time they never stopped shooting." Chung Koo-ho said in a 2009 South Korean documentary, "Even now if I close my eyes I can see the people who were dying, as they cried out someone's name."

Interviews by news organizations and the Inspector General of the Army discovered a wide variety of recollections from the 7th Cavalry veterans. Joseph Jackman, a G Company rifleman, told the BBC that he had deliberately shot people who congregating around the tunnels: “I don't know if they were soldiers or what. Kids, there was kids out there, it didn't matter what it was, 8 to 80, blind, crippled or crazy, they shot 'em all," Norman L. Tinkler, an H Company machine gunner remembered firing on white-clad people coming down the railroad tracks toward the bridge, including "a lot of women and children” stating further that he had fired roughly 1,000 rounds and assumed "there weren't no survivors". Other veterans such as Buddy Wenzel recalled that they fired warning shots over the refugees to keep them contained when the group panicked and the refugees “started to run towards us. We were firing over them all this time. Then somebody yelled, “We’re being fired at,” then there was a bunch that started shooting into the refugees Wenzel and several other veterans stated that weapons, including a Russian burp gun and several grenades were recovered after the shooting stopped.

Veterans from the nearby 1st battalion also witnessed the unfolding events. Thomas H. Hacha, dug in nearby with the 1/7 said that he “could see the tracers (bullets) spinning around inside the tunnel ... and they were dying down there. I could hear the people screaming." The 7th Cavalry treated and evacuated a number of the wounded but they did not allow the rest of the surviving refugees passage behind their lines and kept them under the rail bridge. . Over next two days, the refugees were kept in tunnel by the 2-7 on the one side and by the 1-7 who were defending against repeated infantry and armor incursions, probing attacks, and artillery barrages by the KPA’s 3rd division.

On July 29, 1950, three days after the killings began, the 7th Cavalry Regiment was withdrawn from those positions to Hwanggan as the U.S. retreat continued.

Casualties
In the earliest published account of the killings, three weeks afterward, Chun Wook, a journalist with the North Korean 3rd Division troops who advanced to No Gun Ri, reported finding the area covered with layers of bodies and said about 400 people had been killed. Over the years, the survivors' own estimates of dead ranged from 300 to 500, with perhaps 150 wounded. In Pentagon interviews in 2000, 7th Cavalry veterans' estimates of No Gun Ri dead ranged from dozens to 300. Homer Garza, a retired command sergeant major who as a corporal led a patrol through one No Gun Ri tunnel, said he saw 200 to 300 bodies piled up there, and most may have been dead.

The U.S. Army's 2001 investigative report, citing 1950 aerial imagery, questioned the higher casualty estimates. (See "Aerial imagery, victims' remains" below.) In 2005, the South Korean government's Committee for the Review and Restoration of Honor for the No Gun Ri Victims, after a yearlong process of verifying claims through family registers, medical reports and other documents and testimony, certified the names of 150 No Gun Ri dead, 13 missing and 55 wounded, including some who later died of their wounds. It said reports were not filed on many other victims because of the passage of time and other factors. Of the certified victims, 41 percent were children under 15, and 70 percent were women, children or men over age 61.

Aftermath
Information about the refugee killing reached the U.S. command in Korea and the Pentagon by late August 1950, in the form of a captured and translated North Korean military document that described the discovery. Evidence of high-level knowledge also appeared a month later in a New York Times article from Korea, which reported, without further detail, that an unnamed high-ranking U.S. officer told the reporter that a panicked U.S. Army regiment had shot "many civilians" that July.

Petitions
During the U.S.-supported postwar autocracy of President Syngman Rhee, survivors of No Gun Ri did not file any public complaints. Following the April Revolution in 1960, which briefly established democracy in South Korea, former policeman Chung Eun-yong filed the first petition to the South Korean and U.S. governments. His two small children had been killed and his wife badly wounded at No Gun Ri. Over 30 petitions, calling for an investigation, apology and compensation, were filed over the next decades – by Chung and later by a survivors' committee. In 1997, the survivors and victims filed a claim with a South Korean compensation committee under the binational Status of Forces Agreement. This time, the U.S. claims service responded by again citing what it claimed was a combat situation and saying there was no evidence the 1st Cavalry Division was at No Gun Ri, as the survivors' research indicated.

On April 28, 1998, the Seoul government committee made a final ruling against the No Gun Ri survivors, citing the long-ago expiration of a five-year statute of limitations.

Associated Press story
In 1994 Chung, the leader of the survivors group, published a book about the events of 1950, but it received little attention outside South Korea. In April 1998 The Associated Press reported on the rejection of the survivors' 1997 claim; its reporters had already been investigating for months, searching for 1st Cavalry Division veterans who were at No Gun Ri. On Sept. 29, 1999, after a year of AP internal struggle over releasing the article, the AP published its investigative report on the incident, based on the accounts of 24 No Gun Ri survivors corroborated by 7th Cavalry Regiment veterans. The journalists' research into declassified archives uncovered recorded instructions in frontline units at the time to shoot South Korean refugees advancing on their positions. A liaison officer of the sister 8th Cavalry Regiment had relayed word to his unit from 1st Cavalry Division headquarters to fire on refugees trying to cross U.S. front lines. General Kean of the 25th Infantry Division advised that any civilian encountered in areas cleared by South Korean Police forces should be considered enemies and dealt with accordingly. On the day the No Gun Ri killings began, the Eighth Army ordered all units to stop refugees from crossing their lines. The AP reported in subsequent articles that many more South Korea civilians were killed when refugee columns were strafed by U.S. warplanes in the war's first months and when the U.S. military blew up two Naktong River bridges packed with refugees on Aug. 4, 1950. The No Gun Ri reporting by AP's Sang-hun Choe, Charles J. Hanley, Martha Mendoza and Randy Herschaft was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, along with 10 other major national and international journalism awards.

The AP report, however, came under criticism in May 2000. U.S. News & World Report reported that one of the key AP witnesses, Edward L. Daily, was not present for the events he described. Another of the AP's sources, Eugene Hesselman, stated that he overheard an order from company commander Captain Melbourne Chandler directing his men to fire on the refugees when it was later discovered that Hesselman had been injured and evacuated before the incident took place. According to military historian and former 7th Cavalry officer Robert Bateman, who believes Daily a fraud, he informed the AP team of Daily's deception weeks before their submission to the Pulitzer committee, but the AP team did not disclose this information. Additional sources used by the AP later informed the US Army's investigators and Bateman that they had been misquoted or their interviews had been taken out of context to support events that did not occur. A Pentagon spokesman said this would not affect the Army's No Gun Ri investigation, referring to Daily as "just one guy of many we've been talking to". A May 2000 article in the New York Times weighed the criticism, citing the U. S. News and other reports, and concluded that "in the end, the crucial centerpiece of The A.P. report, the American soldiers killed at least 100 Korean civilians--possibly under direct orders--has been chipped but hardly shattered by the latest revelations".

Still, additional evidence continued to be made public. In June 2000, CBS News reported the existence of a U.S. Air Force memo from July 1950 in which the operations chief in Korea said the Air Force was strafing refugee columns approaching US positions at the Army's request. A Navy document later emerged in which pilots said the Army had told them to attack any groups of more than eight people in South Korea.

Investigations
In March 1999, six months before the AP story was published, the U.S. Army said it had looked into the No Gun Ri allegations as a result of a 1998 request from the U.S. National Council of Churches, on behalf of the Korean National Council of Churches. An Army official wrote the U.S. council that researchers reviewed operational records of the 1st Cavalry and 25th Infantry Divisions and "found no information to substantiate the claim". During the earlier 1998 investigation by Associated Press journalists, reviewing the same records at the U.S. National Archives, several directives to fire on civilians were found.

1999–2001 investigations
Shortly after the publication of the AP report, Secretary of Defense William Cohen ordered Secretary of the Army Louis Caldera to initiate an official Department of the Army investigation. The Seoul government also ordered an investigation, proposing the two inquiries conduct joint document searches and joint witness interviews. The Americans refused.

In the ensuing 15-month probes, conducted by the U.S. Army inspector general's office and Seoul's Defense Ministry, interrogators interviewed or obtained statements from some 200 U.S. veterans and 75 Koreans. The Army researchers reviewed 1 million pages of U.S. archival documents. The final weeks were marked by press reports from Seoul indicating sharp disputes between the U.S. and Korean teams.

On Jan. 11, 2001, the two governments issued their reports. The US report concluded the U.S. military had killed "an unknown number" of South Korean refugees at No Gun Ri with "small-arms fire, artillery and mortar fire, and strafing that preceded or coincided with the NKPA's advance and the withdrawal of U.S. forces in the vicinity of No Gun Ri during the last week of July 1950" but no orders were issued to fire on the civilians, and the shootings were the result of a perceived enemy threat. President Bill Clinton issued a statement on the same day, declaring that "I deeply regret that Korean civilians lost their lives at No Gun Ri in late July, 1950", but stopping short of an apology acknowledging wrongdoing. The U.S. offered a $4 million plan for a memorial at No Gun Ri and scholarship fund, but not the $400 million the individual compensation survivors demanded. The survivors later rejected the plan because the memorial would be dedicated to all the war's South Korean civilian dead rather than just the No Gun Ri victims.

South Korean investigators, while acknowledging a lack of documentation of specific No Gun Ri orders, referred to testimony from five former Air Force pilots that, during this period, they were directed to strafe civilians, and from 17 veterans of the 7th Cavalry that they believed there were orders to use lethal force to stop refugee movement if warranted. The Koreans noted that two of the veterans were battalion radiomen and, as such, were in an especially good position to know which orders had been relayed. Former U.S. congressman Pete McCloskey of California, the only one of eight outside advisers to the U.S. inquiry to write a detailed analysis afterward, agreed with the Koreans. "I don't think there is any question that they were strafing and under orders," he said of U.S. warplanes, and "I thought the Army report was a whitewash". Korean investigators pointed out gaps in U.S.-supplied documentation, gaps that included the 7th Cavalry's journal, or communications log, for July 1950, the crucial document that would have carried No Gun Ri orders. It was missing from its place at the National Archives.

Surviving documents said nothing about infiltrators at No Gun Ri, even though they would have been the 7th Cavalry's first enemy killed-in-action in Korea. However, several of the battalion soldiers interviewed said their unit was returning hostile fire from the tunnels. The Korean survivors said there were no infiltrators in their group, and the South Korean investigative report argued the illogic of trapped infiltrators firing on the surrounding battalion, doubted the scenario. The survivors' committee called the U.S. Army report a "whitewash" of command responsibility.

Legal framework
Speaking with reporters, Clinton had said, "The evidence was not clear that there was responsibility for wrongdoing high enough in the chain of command in the Army to say that, in effect, the government was responsible."

Established international laws of war held governments responsible for their soldiers' acts. "A belligerent party ... shall be responsible for all acts committed by persons forming part of its armed forces," says the 1907 Hague Convention on the laws of warfare, which the United States declared it would abide by at the Korean War's outbreak, along with the 1949 Geneva Conventions' articles regarding protection of civilians during wartime. In addition, the Hague Convention and the U.S. Army's own contemporaneous Rules of Land Warfare manual said troops must distinguish noncombatants from belligerents and treat them humanely. "Thus, the United States of America should take responsibility for the No Gun Ri incident," the South Korean government's victims review committee concluded in 2005. Writing to the Army inspector general's office after issuance of its 2001 investigative report, American lawyers for the survivors said that whether the 7th Cavalry troops acted under formal orders or not, "the massacre of civilian refugees, mainly the elderly, women and children, was in and of itself a clear violation of international law for which the United States is liable under the doctrine of command responsibility and must pay compensation".

Further evidence emerges
A joint U.S.-South Korean "statement of mutual understanding" issued with the separate 2001 investigative reports did not include the assertion that no orders to shoot refugees were issued at No Gun Ri. But that remained a central "finding" of the U.S. report itself, which either did not address or presented incomplete versions of key declassified documents previously reported in the news media. In describing the July 1950 Air Force memo, the U.S. report did not acknowledge it said refugees were being strafed at the Army's request. The report did not address the order in the 25th Infantry Division to shoot civilians in the war zone. In saying no such orders were issued at No Gun Ri, the Army did not disclose that the 7th Cavalry log, which would have held such orders, was missing from the National Archives.



After the Army issued its report, it was learned it also had not disclosed its researchers' discovery of at least 14 additional declassified documents showing high-ranking commanders ordering or authorizing the use of lethal force to stop refugees in certain areas in the Korean War's early months. They included communications from 1st Cavalry Division commander Gay and a top division officer to consider refugees north of the firing line "fair game" and to "shoot all refugees coming across river".



Then, in 2005–2006, American historian Sahr Conway-Lanz reported his discovery of a declassified document at the National Archives in which the United States Ambassador to Korea in 1950, John J. Muccio, notified the State Department on the day the No Gun Ri killings began that the U.S. military, fearing infiltrators, had adopted a policy of shooting South Korean refugee groups that approached U.S. lines despite warning shots.

Aerial Imagery
As part of the U.S. Army's 2001 report into the incident, thousands of feet of aerial film taken by USAF reconnaissance were also analyzed. Among the reconnaissance films, investigators discovered aerial images taken of the area on Aug. 6, 1950, 11 days after the events. These images were analyzed by two separate groups within the United States: the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NIMA). The AFIP has many experts who specialize in the location and identification of mass graves and have recently been used to locate these sites in places such as Bosnia. According to the both NIMA and the AFIP, they saw no indication of scavenger activity on corpses, bodies being dragged off site, decomposition, blood stained soil, mass graves or any photographic indication that a mass killing had taken place. This analysis is significant because several Korean eyewitnesses have stated that mass graves were used to bury the dead and that they had returned to bridge and saw “many dead decomposing bodies in the area and that some bodies had been temporarily buried” and other Korean eyewitnesses stated that many of the bodies had not been buried until mid August. According to the US Army report, this suggested the No Gun Ri death toll was lower than Korean estimates.

The 2001 South Korean investigative report drew primarily on accounts from survivors and nearby residents and said many bodies had been taken away by relatives or buried in soldiers' abandoned foxholes in the days following the killings, and some remained inside one underpass tunnel, under thin layers of dirt, out of sight of airborne cameras and awaiting later burial in mass graves however the aerial footage analyzed by the US showed fighting holes used by 2-7 Cavalry still intact on August 6, 1950. South Korean military specialists questioned the U.S. reconnaissance photos because they had been spliced and were not original copies. In response, the US team verified the reconstructed film matched the originals and made recommendations for a process to better document reconstruction efforts on damaged archival footage.

Archaeological Survey
In July 2007 a team from Chungbuk National University began an archaeological excavation of the site to search for the physical remains of those killed at No Gun Ri. The team, led by professor of History of Ancient Art Park Seon-ju, planned on excavating several sites where eyewitnesses said they had buried the remains of the victims and DNA analysis of the remains would be performed to determine the identities of this found. The excavation turned up no bodies, bones or other remains.

Continuing appeals
Though often supported by South Korean politicians and newspaper editorials, the No Gun Ri survivors' repeated demands for a reopened U.S. investigation and compensation went unheeded. Meeting with South Korean officials in 2001, the survivors asked that their government seek action at the International Court of Justice at The Hague and in U.N. human rights forums, but were rebuffed. In 2002, a spokesman for South Korea's then-governing party called for a new U.S. inquiry, but the Defense Ministry later warned the National Assembly a reopened probe might damage U.S.-South Korean relations. The disclosure in 2007 that Pentagon investigators had omitted the Ambassador Muccio letter from their final report, along with other incriminating documents and testimony, prompted more calls for action. Two leaders of the National Assembly appealed to the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee for a joint investigation, but no U.S. congressional body ever took up the No Gun Ri issue.

Special act, No Gun Ri park
After the United States refused to offer compensation, and the survivors rejected the plan for a war memorial and scholarship fund, South Korea's National Assembly on February 9, 2004, adopted a Special Act on the Review and Restoration of Honor for the No Gun Ri Victims. It established the committee that examined and certified the identities of dead and wounded, and it provided medical subsidies for surviving wounded. The act also envisioned a memorial park at the No Gun Ri site, which had begun attracting 20,000 to 30,000 visitors a year. The 29-acre (12-ha.) No Gun Ri Peace Park, built with $17 million in government funds and featuring a memorial, museum and peace education center, opened in October 2011. A publicly financed No Gun Ri International Peace Foundation also sponsored an annual peace conference, a No Gun Ri Peace Prize and a summer peace camp at the park for international university students.

No Gun Ri in culture
In South Korea, the No Gun Ri story inspired works of nonfiction, fiction, theater and other arts. In 2010, a major Korean studio, Myung Films, released a No Gun Ri feature film, A Little Pond, written and directed by Lee Saang-woo and featuring Song Kang-ho, Moon So-ri and other Korean stars who donated their work. Besides commercial release in South Korea, the movie was screened at international film festivals, including in New York and London. In 2006, artist Park Kun-woong and Chung Eun-yong published Nogunri Story volume 1 - Recollecting that summer day a 612-page graphic narrative that told the story through thousands of drawings. The Korean-language work, based on Chung Eun-yong's 1994 book, was also published in translation in Europe. In the United States, No Gun Ri was a theme of four English-language novels, including the National Book Award finalist Lark & Termite of 2009, by Jayne Anne Phillips.

No Gun Ri's repercussions
The 1999 No Gun Ri articles prompted hundreds of South Koreans to come forward to report other alleged incidents of large-scale civilian killings by the U.S. military in 1950–1951, mostly air attacks. In 2005 the National Assembly created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the Republic of Korea to investigate these, as well as other human rights violations in southern Korea during the 20th century. The commission's docket eventually held more than 200 cases of what it described as "civilian massacre committed by U.S. soldiers".

By 2009 the commission's work of collating declassified U.S. military documents with survivors' accounts confirmed eight representative cases of what it found were wrongful U.S. killings of hundreds of South Korean civilians, including refugees crowded into a cave attacked with napalm bombs, and those at a shoreline refugee encampment deliberately shelled by a U.S. warship.

The commission alleged that the U.S. military repeatedly conducted indiscriminate attacks, failing to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. In its most significant finding, the commission also confirmed that South Korean authorities had summarily executed thousands of suspected leftists in South Korea – possibly 100,000 to 200,000 – at the outbreak of the war, sometimes with U.S. Army officers present and taking photographs.

Of all American wars, the Korean conflict is believed to have been the deadliest for civilians as a proportion of those killed, including noncombatants killed in extensive U.S. Air Force bombing of North Korea, and southern civilians summarily executed by the invading northerners. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommended the Seoul government negotiate with the United States for reparations for large-scale civilian killings by the U.S. military. This did not occur. Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Stanley Roth had been quoted as saying in Seoul at the outset of the No Gun Ri investigation in 1999 that the United States would consider investigating any similar Korean War killings that came to light. The 1999 investigation was the last conducted by the United States.