Someone else already answered about veterans opposing the war, so i'll just address the other questions.
Follow up question: do you think a time will come when Muslims fighting as the Taliban or Al Qaeda in the Middle East are accepted in the same way that the Communists in Vietnam are?
The Taliban/al-Qaeda (which can't be lumped in with "Muslims" in general, because most of their victims are Muslims and most of the people actually fighting them are Muslims) are very different kinds of organizations than the communists. In fact they were in large part created to fight communism. The Taliban/al-Qaeda are fighting for an ultraconservative theocracy. The communists were fighting for social equality and political/economic independence. Even people who hate communism will usually grudgingly acknowledge some of its positive aspects, such as promotion of women's rights, universal healthcare, free education, anti-fascism, etc. Communism brought about a great deal of scientific achievement, economic development and social progress, and it held a strong attraction to the workers, peasants, the poor and exploited in general around the world. It still does, actually, in some regions. As for the communists' political violence, it generally paled in comparison to the far more savage violence of anti-communism, such as the gigantic US bombing of Vietnam, which killed millions. The enemies of communism were usually far more violent and oppressive than the communists supposedly were, which made a lot of people skeptical as to who the "bad guy" really was in conflicts like Vietnam.
By comparison, there really aren't any upsides to the Taliban/al-Qaeda organizations, there's nothing to rally for there. They have a hideous, ultra-reactionary, extremely oppressive ideology with really no discernible positive aspects to balance it out. Really all they have going for them is that they're fighting the West (except when they form tactical alliances with it, as they did in Libya and are now doing in Syria), which is the main reason why they have a steady flow of recruits.
HOWEVER, many Americans do oppose the US wars in the Middle East in general without supporting the US's opponent the way many had once supported the Viet Cong. They still oppose the war itself. Either for selfish reasons (e.g all this war is too expensive for the warmongering country, or it's unwinnable, etc), or for humanitarian reasons (e.g ordinary Muslims being bombed and terrorized so the war is unjust), or for ideological reasons (e.g the wars are about controlling resources and markets for the capitalists, not about "freedom" or "fighting terrorism", so the war is imperialist and should be opposed), or for pragmatic reasons (e.g slaughtering innocent Muslims drives many of them to al-Qaeda just because al-Qaeda is the one fighting back even if they don't agree with its ideology, so the war is only exacerbating the very thing it's supposedly fighting).
And before all the justifications for the current wars - remember the same kinds of steadfast, life-or-death, existensial-threat type justifications were offered for Vietnam, right?
Yeah, and it's just as much bullsh!t now as it was then. There's nothing more obscene than a globe-spanning empire constantly shrieking about existential threats to itself while bombing entire countries back to the stone age every few years to protect its global economic, political and military hegemony. It's the US that's the threat to the world, not the other way around.
The people, and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of history.
-Mao Zedong
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