Vietnam War: How did people see it then?

Shocked by Kerry's language in my last post describing the Vietnam War in 1971 as "this barbaric war"?

Then check out this passage by Telford Taylor, who served as the chief counsel for the United States at the Nuremberg war crimes trials after the Second World War.  He wrote in Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (1970), while the war of course was still going on:

But it is not the [antiwar] demonstrations that cast the shadows of doubt and cynicism across those White House posthumous awards of Medals of Honor, and the countless memorials and mournings in humbler quarters; rather it is our own record as a nation, especially since 1964. ...

As one who until 1965 supported American intervention in Vietnam as an aggression-checking undertaking in the spirit of the United Nations Charter, I am painfully aware of the instability of individual judgment.  Nevertheless, when the nature, scale and effect of intervention changed so drastically in 1965, it is more than "puzzling" (as the Senate Refugee Subcommittee put it) that virtually no one in high authority had the capacity and inclination to perceive and articulate the inevitable consequences.  How could it ever have been thought that air strikes, free-fire zones and a mass uprooting and removal of the rural population were the way to win "the allegiance of the South Vietnamese"?  By what mad cerebrations could a ratio of 28 to 1 between our investments in bombing, and in relief for those we had wounded and made homeless, have even been contemplated, let alone adopted as the operational pattern?

One may well echo the acrid French epigram, and say that all this "is worse than a crime, it is a blunder" - the most costly and tragic national blunder in American history.  And so it has come to this: that the anti-aggression spirit of Nuremberg and the United Nations Charter is invoked to justify our venture in Vietnam, where we have smashed the country to bits, and will not even take the trouble to clean up the blood and rubble.  None there will ever thank us; few elsewhere that do not now see our America as a sort of Steinbeckian "Lennie," gigantic and powerful, but prone to shatter what we try to save.  Somehow we failed ourselves to learn the lessons we undertook to teach at Nuremberg, and that failure is today's American tragedy. (my emphasis)

I should point out that Taylor's book actually rejected the argument that some opponents of the war made, that the Vietnam War was in itself illegal aggression under international law.

What Taylor did question, though, was whether some policies adopted, like the use of "free-fire zones," were justifiable under international law.  Kerry also specifically questioned the legality of the free-fire zones.  The idea was that certain areas were cleared of all civilians, and therefore anyone caught in a free-fire zone was assumed to be an enemy soldier/guerrilla.  So they could be gunned down on sight.

In practice, many civilian noncombatants were killed in this way, which made the task of counterinsurgency that much more difficult.  And the revelations of the way in which the war was actually being conducted, the free-fire zones among them, had a great deal to do with undermining public support for the war in the US.  As Taylor indicates in the quotation above, such policies were not only likely in violation of international law, they were clearly counterproductive to the US goals in the war.