I read a book by Nugyen Cao Key in which he mentions that his Father fought under Ho Chi Minh during WWII. He said Ho kept the fact that he was a Communist a secret.
Key said many of them would never have supported him if they had known.
Supposedly Ho embraced communism when the western democracies wouldn’t support the Vietnamese people in their quest for independence after WWI (he traveled to Versailles to advocate for it, but to no avail). The only support he could get was from the USSR and Mao, so he had to get with the program. Throughout the war many Viet Cong maintained that they were nationalists first and communists second; I don’t believe afterwards they had the harsh class warfare retributions that were seen in the USSR or Cambodia (though they were absolutely a dictatorship). That seems borne out by their rush to embrace capitalism now; FWIW, I don’t think we should have any dealings with the Hanoi government.