https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program#Torture
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre#Killings
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange#Use_in_the_Vietnam_War
Read through that and tell me what we missed.
The American military tried everything just shy of nuking Hanoi. Anyone who tells you otherwise is ignorant or trying to sell you something.
Soviet-sponsored air and naval defenses prevent North Vietnam from being saturation bombarded at the scale we inflicted on North Korea a decade earlier. Americans were largely confined to combat against insurgencies in the South. So much of the war was fought against the civilian population that the Americans were ostensibly there to protect from the villainous Communists.
But the idea that we simply didn't use enough troops or sufficiently advanced weaponry or brutal tactics... that's all reactionary mythology. If skinning half the population alive would have won the war, we'd have done it. A far more compelling argument is that Americans alienated the entire peninsula with our "all out" invasion (not unlike how we ended up alienating the bulk of the Afghan population following our '02 invasion). A subtler and more strategic approach - like our efforts to stand up anti-communist governments in The Philippines and Indonesia - seemed to have far better results in hindsight.
