I've always heard officers and intelligence veterans of Vietnam say that it was war lost on the homefront, not on the battlefield. My professor has allowed my paper topic to be: Could the US have won the Vietnam war using the same methods it was? If not what were alternative strategies? Do you know any source material that could help me?
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Be aware that alternative history is not really the best approach to this. The best approach would be to answer the question why the US lost militarily in the first place.
To answer that question, there are plenty of great sources available to you. Since the Vietnam War is a very contentious topic, I'd suggest that you read up on the historiography of the war for starters. Some suggestions from my side would be the following:
"The Unending Debate: Historians and the Vietnam War" by Gary R. Hess, Diplomatic History 18:2 (1994).
"Rethinking the Vietnam War: Orthodoxy and Revisionism" by Andrew Preston, International Politics Review 1 (2013).
”Refighting Vietnam in the History Books: The Historiography of the War” by Phillip E. Catton, OAH Magazine of History 18:5 (2004).
"Vietnam: Historians at War" by Mark Moyar, Academic Questions 21:1 (2008).
After you've brushed yourself up with the state of current historiography and how it has changed, it's time to take your first step into counterinsurgency.
Straight off the bat, you'll want to pick up John A. Nagl's Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam (University of Chicago Press, 2005). This is a great scholarly book for beginners to understand the organizational culture involved in counterinsurgency in Vietnam and Malaya (where Britain fought a successful war). I would recommend trying to stay away from general overview of the Vietnam War since you're going to want to focus on military matters for this. After Nagl, you should take the time to consider opposing scholarly view points. One such example is Gregory Daddis' Westmoreland's War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam (Oxford University Press, 2013) which grew out of a critical response to Nagl. It's a great counterpoint and a good way for you to start analyzing the two sides of the coin and to start your own research.
From there on, you can start crafting your arguments (you might be leaning more towards Nagl, more towards Gaddis or perhaps you make your own original argument) and perhaps do some of your own original research in (for example), the Vietnam Center and Archive in Texas Tech. They are very helpful if you send them an e-mail. If you're interested in understand guerilla warfare, I would recommend staying away from many popular histories over guerilla warfare (like the books by Max Boot) and instead focus on scholars such as Ian F.W. Beckett whose Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies: Guerrillas and their Opponents since 1750 (Routledge, 2001) has been a primer since the early 2000s.
One of my favorite sources for the Vietnam War was the documentary, "Vietnam in HD". It talks a lot about the war from a soldier's perspective, and even one from the perspective of a soldier's wife. It talks about how the war was lost from the homefront perspective, and how the effort was insanely destructive for what it achieved.