Todd,
I need to take issue with some of your comments.  In our current "no blood for oil", "Bush lied, people died" catch-phrase, bumper-sticker political-blame atmosphere, I think some of your statements are suffering from a presentism bias and some are simply mistaken.  I'll explain.

Today, the claim that the U.S. invaded Iraq for oil is a popular one, regardless of the fact that I certainly have not seen or taken advantage of the free/cheaper influx of oil when I gas up my car.  As a historian, the classified materials are not yet available and it is far too early to "tell", or claim to know the answers.  Heck, we are still just getting the release of former classified documents from 30 years ago. My point is this.  

France was the imperial power that extracted raw materials (rubber) from its colonial possession, Vietnam.  That is the truth included in both Herring and the PBS series.  The island nation of Japan, with limited resources, also wanted the raw materials of that region, and took them after defeating the French in that region during WWII.  But from the end of WWII and start of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the struggle for Vietnam changed drastically.  The United States emerged as the world's superpower and was not "in" Vietnam for raw materials.  (That is the view of "New Left" historian Gabriel Kolko, not George Herring.)  So, as stated in your post, some of these important distinctions are left out, and as a result, a dubious conclusion has been reached.  U.S. motivations in Vietnam were a far cry from the French motivations.

You also omit the truth of the AIM claims that communist-led oppression, retaliations, mass killings, loss of freedoms, etc. did indeed occur both before and after the reunification of Vietnam.  Ho Chi Minh's failed land reform in the North, and the thousands of people killed by his forces is included in the Herring text.  So is the resulting communist-led atrocities in Cambodia and the reunified Vietnam after the war.  (We haven't gotten to that time period yet in this class, but the AIM clip refers to them.)  You call the AIM reference to these killings as a "black and white interpretation", an quickly move to the more problematic economic explanation, discussed above.

And I'm sure you know.  We don't have to take for fact 100% of what we see in either the PBS or AIM videos.  But to treat either source as "black or white" (all or nothing), would be unwise, as the NYT article suggests.

The economic reason for our initial involvement in Indochina is covered in great detail at the beginning of the PBS series as well as the beginning of Herring's Book. Herring clearly outlines America’s need for the regions raw materials as contributing to the war with Japan and our support of nationalism in Indochina over French colonization, which would lead to a French monopoly of those same materials (8-11). The decision to stop communism in the beginning seems less about communistic ideology or the oppressive conditions endured by the people living under it, and more about maintaining access to raw material and Asian markets (18-20). Yet, absolutely nothing is mentioned about any of this in the AIM program. Their position is that only our concern for the welfare and humane treatment of the citizens of Indochina drove U.S. policy.

By maintaining the position that U.S. soldiers fought and died to save a people and their freedoms, the AIM program failed the viewer by oversimplifying the situation and omitting important, albeit more ignoble, factors in our involvement. Because of this I tend to believe what I’ve watched in the PBS series and what I’ve read in Herring’s book concerning this issue.

Todd Lowry