A mother prays for success for her child in the college entrance examinations at a Buddhist temple in Seoul, South Korea, November 12, 2015. About 630,000 students on Thursday sat for the annual exams that could lead them to one of the country's top universities. In South Korea, there is no higher achievement than to be accepted by a prestigious university. As a result, many students prepare for these entrance exams from an early age, often studying up to 16 hours a day for years to take this test. (Photo by Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters)

To draw the public's attention to a new line of bathing suits, a Tokyo department store used live models to show off the suits on June 5, 1950. The rain didn't bother the curious, and both the girls and the crowd seemed to like the idea of staring at each other through the glass. (Photo by AP Photo via The Atlantic)

Steamed Chinese-style buns, known locally as salapao, are decorated with faces during the start of the annual 10-day vegetarian festival in Bang Saphan, southern Thailand on October 13, 2015. (Photo by Matthew Richards/Courtesy Image)

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)

A Sri Lankan child uses an inflatable tube to wade through floodwaters after heavy rains in Biyagama suburb of Colombo, Sri Lanka, 06 June 2021. Many parts of the island have been inundated due to heavy monsoon rains. According to the Sri Lanka Disaster Management Center, at least 14 people have been killed so far and more than 245,212 people affected across the country. (Photo by Chamila Karunarathne/EPA/EFE)

A spot-billed pelican sits on a street light in Colombo on March 16, 2021. (Photo by Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP Photo)

An adult specimen of Nannospalax (leucodon) montanosyrmiensis, a variant of the lesser mole-rat (Spalax leucodon) is pictured near Albertirsa, some 60 kilometers southeast of Budapest, Hungary, 12 May 2018. The critically endangered rodent lives in several isolated populations in the Carpathian Basin. (Photo by Sandor Ujvari/EPA/EFE)

“Light From Heaven”. Taken around Mount Bromo, East Java, Indonesia in the morning. Photo location: East Java, Indonesia. (Photo and caption by Pimpin Nagawan/National Geographic Photo Contest)

ATTENTION! All pictures are presented in high resolution. To see Hi-Res images – just TWICE click on any picture. In other words, click small picture – opens the BIG picture. Click BIG picture – opens VERY BIG picture.