HJ, I am sorry to say that what I read and saw of contemporary accounts accords more with your view than SASLess.
One thing that the 'good guys' hated was the bitter and cunning irregular warfare fought by the bad guys - digging pits, inserting poisoned and sharpened bamboo canes designed to spear the boot going in and ankle coming out.
The ingenuity of using a 105mm shell to lob a second 105mm shell up to 5 km.
OK, keeping prisoners in cages wasn't nice but they could not risk large WW2 style POW camps - look what happened when a US Buffalo Hunter mission found a camp.
Popular culture too, with a fairly amusing, if you weren't there, RT chatter between an F4 flight dropping a load of ordnance and the FACs low down.
And HJ has it right when they say the NVA were 'our' bad guys. We would have felt the same had Clinton sent US Peace Keepers into Northern Ireland.
One vet I met, an AF WO was ashamed to be an American when he returned from VN. He had returned expecting a joyous home-coming to find instead a Jane Fonda welcome instead. Many in the US were anti-war because of the body bags. Were the soldiers in VN heroic fighters or risk averse and resorting to massive fire-power?