A woman sits on a curb at the scene of a shooting outside of a music festival along the Las Vegas Strip, Monday, October 2, 2017, in Las Vegas. Multiple victims were being transported to hospitals after a shooting late Sunday at a music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. (Photo by John Locher/AP Photo)

Brides-to-be participate in the “Running of the Brides” race in a park in Bangkok, Thailand March 25, 2017. (Photo by Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters)

A child plays in front of “Etnias”, a large graffiti wall by Brazilian graffiti artist Eduardo Kobra created ahead of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games at Porto Maravilha in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 30 July 2016. The Olympics start on 05 August. Eduardo Kobra hopes to set a Guinness World Record for the largest graffiti created by a single artist. (Photo by Lukas Coch/EPA)

In the spring of 1965, within weeks of 3,500 American Marines arriving in Vietnam, a 39-year-old Briton named Larry Burrows began work on a feature for LIFE magazine, chronicling the day-to-day experience of U.S. troops on the ground – and in the air – in the midst of the rapidly widening war. The photographs in this gallery focus on a calamitous March 31, 1965, helicopter mission; Burrows’ “report from Da Nang”, featuring his pictures and his personal account of the harrowing operation, was published two weeks later as a now-famous cover story in the April 16, 1965, issue of LIFE.

Photo: Man your battle stations: The crew chief of helicopter Yankee Papa 13, lance corporal James C. Farley, mans an M-60 machine gun during a mission near Da Nang, Vietnam on March 31, 1965. (Photo by Larry Burrows/Time & Life Pictures)

Dancers wearing face shields to prevent the spread of the coronavirus perform during an exercise in Tangerang, Indonesia, Saturday, November 28, 2020, (Photo by Tatan Syuflana/AP Photo)

A police officer holds a pistol during clashes with protesters near a burning tyre barricade in the Kariobangi slum of Nairobi, Kenya Friday, May 8, 2020. Hundreds of protesters blocked one of the capital's major highways with burning tires to protest government demolitions of the homes of more than 7,000 people and the closure of a major food market, causing many to sleep out in the rain and cold because of restrictions on movement due to the coronavirus. (Photo by Brian Inganga/AP Photo)

A man wearing a Spiderman costume jumps across Shibuya crossing in Tokyo on June 8, 2020. (Photo by Charly Triballeau/AFP Photo)

An Indigenous man stands under a water fountain outside a government building in Brasilia, on April 26, 2019, during the last day of a protest camp. Approximately 4,000 indigenous people from different tribes are taking part in protests during the Indigenous National Mobilization (MNI) week, a mobilization which seeks to tackle territorial rights' negotiations with the government. (Photo by Carl De Souza/AFP Photo)