re: Could any strategy have worked in Vietnam?

My best hindsight, and I've studied this for all of my adult life, is more or less based on Harry Summers book, On Strategy. With U.S. support, the ARVN could likely have handled the VC, but not the NVA (and certainly not both). SO, we should have let the Diem government run wild in the interior and deal with the VC as they saw fit. If U.S. involvement had been focused exclusively on 3 things:

1. Air/artillery support of the ARVN

2. Interdiction of supplies and reinforcements coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail

3. Fighting the NVA regular units and infiltrators at the Northern and Western frontier,

...then the press coverage wouldn't have portrayed the U.S. involvement in such a negative light, the U.S. body count wouldn't have been the only story the U.S. press wanted to cover and public opinion wouldn't have soured nearly so quickly. The draft would have still been escalated, but not nearly as much and at not nearly the cost in casualties.

At least that's how I've seen it for at least 20 years.