The North Vietnamese saw the war very differently. By nature and practice, they viewed conflict in much broader terms. They looked at the political situation in the South, where American search-and-destroy missions were alienating South Vietnamese peasants. The North Vietnamese, meanwhile, did everything they could to win the peasants over and earned for themselves an army of millions of silent sympathizers. How could the South be secure when the Americans had failed to capture the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese farmers?
