The logic was grimly straightforward. The Paris Peace Accords mandated a ceasefire in place, meaning each side would keep whatever territory it held when the guns stopped. An International Commission of Control and Supervision, composed of Canadian, Indonesian, Hungarian, and Polish representatives, would confirm who controlled what. North Vietnam had insisted on this arrangement; South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu had opposed it but was pressured by the Nixon administration into accepting. When the final terms were agreed on 23 January, with signing set for the 27th, both sides already had their plans in motion. North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces prepared to flood into populated lowlands and plant their flag in as many hamlets as possible. The South Vietnamese, having learned from a similar gambit the previous October, had prepared counterattacks of their own. The result was eleven days of intense fighting across every region of South Vietnam, from the DMZ to the Mekong Delta.

The fighting unfolded simultaneously across the country's four military regions, each with its own character. In the north, South Vietnamese Marines launched a final assault on 26 January to recapture the Cua Viet naval base along the Cam Lo River. They took it by 7:00 a.m. on the 28th, one hour before the ceasefire. The North Vietnamese counterattacked that evening and retook it by the 31st. Around Da Nang, the ARVN 3rd Division cleared Viet Cong forces from hamlets west and southwest of the city, and by month's end only one hamlet in Dai Loc District remained under communist influence. Along the central coast in Quang Ngai Province, North Vietnamese forces rocketed provincial capitals and cut Highway 1, while farther south in Binh Dinh and Phu Yen, South Vietnamese regional and popular forces fought hamlet by hamlet to prevent permanent occupation. In the Mekong Delta, a preemptive South Vietnamese operation called Dong Khoi had already inflicted over 2,000 casualties on communist forces, crippling their capacity to seize ground before the deadline arrived.

What made the campaign so revealing was its absurdity. Troops on both sides fought and died not for strategic advantage but for the position of pins on a map that international observers might or might not confirm. The North Vietnamese broke their forces into small units and tried to enter as many hamlets as they could, spreading themselves thin in the process. In many cases, villagers simply left when communist soldiers arrived and returned only when South Vietnamese forces drove them out. In the III Corps region around Saigon, some 144 hamlets were contested at one point or another, but by 3 February only 14 remained under communist control. Four days later, all were back in government hands. The PAVN had even planned to seize Tay Ninh as a capital for the Viet Cong in the south, but preemptive ARVN operations had drawn away the forces needed for the attempt. The flag-planting exercise cost lives on both sides for territory that changed hands within days.

Between 28 January and 9 February 1973, South Vietnamese forces claimed over 5,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong killed across the country. Of more than 400 hamlets attacked, only 23 were still contested by 9 February. American observers at MACV headquarters in Saigon attributed the communist failure to two strategic errors: waiting too long to launch operations, in the mistaken belief that the ceasefire would deter South Vietnamese counterattacks, and fragmenting local forces across too many targets, leaving each unit too weak to hold what it seized. The South Vietnamese, having watched a rehearsal of this exact strategy during a near-ceasefire in October 1972, were ready. Regional and popular forces proved capable of clearing occupied hamlets with minimal support from regular army units. U.S. analysts concluded that the military balance in South Vietnam was close to even, and that Saigon's armed forces could hold their own against the forces Hanoi had deployed in the south. That assessment would prove tragically optimistic. Within two years, the balance would collapse entirely.