Moral superiority and superior propaganda are different things. The lesson of the Western colonial experience is that we can be right on everything and still lose in the court of native public opinion. The bottom line is that locals are more likely to believe someone of the same skin color, no matter how outrageous the lies and libels. My contention is that hearts and minds is chimerical. The reason the North Vietnamese won is superior firepower. They held on to South Vietnam after victory without having having to deal with an insurgency because they executed and starved to death hundreds of thousands of former government officials, while driving over a million refugees into the shark-infested waters of the South China Sea.
You are the first person I have ever heard from who suggested that we lost to the VC because they had superior firepower. Quite the contrary. We had overwhelmingly dominant firepower, kill ratios that almost exterminated the VC and we still managed to lose because we fought the wrong war for the wrong purpose. The only folks who didn't know that were LBJ, Gen Westmoreland and, now, struggling in across the finish line, you.