There was no more chance of willing the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese than Churchill had of doing so in India. Calling the "Wild West" counter insurgency is (Well let me be polite) preposterous. Were any nation to adopt today US Indian policy they would be hauled before the War Crimes tribunal at the Hague. It was a combination of ethnic cleansing, genocide and concentration camps. Have you ever heard of Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Marais, Bear River ? Are you aware of Colonel Henry Bouquet distributing smallpox laden blankets to the Indians? He was actually pretty proud of what he did writing to his commander “Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them.” William Sherman was the commanding general during what you would call the pacification of the Indians. His view "The more Indians we can kill... the less will have to be killed the next war, for the more I see of these Indians, the more convinced I am that they all have to be killed or be maintained as a species of paupers." and "We must act with vindictive earnestness against the Sioux, even to their extermination, men, women and children... during an assault, the soldiers cannot pause to distinguish between male and female, or even discriminate as to age." Compared to Sherman the Strategic Hamlet program seems autistic.
