I've read that in regards to the Battle of Hill 937 (Hamburger Hill) that the commanding general thought a frontal attack best because the it brought more glory to battlefield, driving the enemy from the field through sheer firepower. A concentrated air strike could have destroyed the hill. I think it was in A Rumor of War that the author's Colonel balked at the sustaining seventy causalities in a battle because is unit took that many casualties in ten seconds on Guadalcanal.
Is there any truth to the idea that some of the battles in Vietnam were fought the way they were because the commanding officer's plans were colored by their experiences in WWII?
You ask a very interesting question. Let me first say that pitched battles were incredibly rare during the Vietnam War. Pitched battles, meaning a conventional engagement, was not part of the nature of warfare which the Vietnam War pushed the US and her allies into. The few conventional battles that the US were involved with were not ordered for reasons of glory, but for rational (out of a conventional perspective) strategic reasons. Hamburger Hill, in particular, was the exception rather than the rule: Instead of the reliance on trying to fix the enemy in place and then overwhelming them with overwhelming firepower, the choice was made to focus on infantry assaults.
Why?
In an unpublished monograph by Kelly Boian (United States Army Command and General Staff College) titled Major General Melvin Zais and Hamburger Hill, the author argues that General Melvin Zais, commander of the 101st Airborne during the 1969 battle, would naturally have drawn conclusions on the best way to conquer the hill by looking back at his previous experience in WWII when he served as Lieutenant Colonel with the 517th Parachute Regimental Combat Team during the battle of Col de Braus in the French Alps, 1944. The author argues that Zais based his entire conduct of the battle of Hamburger Hill on his experiences of Col de Braus, a battle which had superficial similarities and thus, in Zais mind, relevant. There is no word, however, regarding the idea that these assaults were ordered due to a thirst for "battlefield glory". Zais based his decisions on what one could argue was instinct drawn from a battle that he had personally fought more than 20 years previously and which made sense to him.