Also, American and, more generally, anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist discourses tend to infantilize people in these countries. I doubt the Vietnamese had a simplistic, love-hate relationship with either the French or the Americans even after the innumerable atrocities. Just like in every other nation even the masses were and are capable of complex strategic, mixed-motive thinking. Look at the sheer devastation America has caused in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet AFAIU neither most Iraqis nor most Afghanis wish for U.S. involvement to completely disappear. Americans would never believe themselves capable of pressing a war out of pure spite, anger, or retaliation; yet we somehow think other groups do? IOW, there's something problematic in thinking that what fundamentally drove the Vietnamese was a response to American atrocities. Far more likely (and consonant with the notion that all communities around the world tend to behave similarly) is that those atrocities exacerbated underlying, primary dynamics. Afterall, the merchant class by definition didn't tend to live on rice farms. They were centered in the cities.
The U.S. tried to implement many of the same policies the British did in Malaysia. During the communist insurgency in Malaysia the British corralled ethnic Chinese (the primary supporters of communism, such as they were--i.e. it wasn't that simple) into cities and towns. (To this day ethnic Chinese can't own rural farms outright in Malaysia.) But Chinese communities were already mostly urban, and were of course a minority (20-30%). It was a plan that arguably worked by accident. But such a strategy was never going to work in Vietnam because the dynamics were totally flipped. That would have been much more obvious if the U.S. saw the ethnic divisions for what they were.