The solar eclipse is seen above the Washington Monument on April 08, 2024 in Washington, DC. People have traveled to areas across North America that are in the “path of totality” in order to experience the eclipse today. The next total solar eclipse that can be seen from a large part of North America won't happen until 2044. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Spectators cheer after Medina Spirit, ridden by John Velazquez wins 147th Kentucky Derby at. Churchill Downs, in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S. May 1, 2021. (Photo by Bryan Woolston/Reuters)

Selena Gomez, left, and Taylor Swift arrive at the MTV Video Music Awards at the Microsoft Theater on Sunday, August 30, 2015, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP Photo)

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)

Actress Victoria Justice arrives at the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards at Nokia Theatre L.A. LIVE on August 28, 2011 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Christopher Polk/Getty Images)

“Show us our butts! Mucawana tribe – Angola. In Soba village, the Muhacaona (Mucawana) tribe, perhaps the best place i have visited. They use cow dung and fat to make this so nice haircut, and love the beads. They asked me to make pictures of their backs... and butts to see on the camera screen if everything was perfect!”. (Photo and comments by Eric Lafforgue)

The Northern Lights glow green in a spectacular light show above a field of trees frozen solid with snow. (Photo by Jaak Sarv/Solent News & Photo Agency)

Ethnic Cham Muslim people pass the time near their boats on banks of Mekong river in Phnom Penh July 29, 2013. About 100 ethnic Cham families, made up of nomads and fishermen without houses or land who arrived at the Cambodian capital in search of better lives, live on their small boats on a peninsula where the Mekong and Tonle Sap rivers meet, just opposite the city's centre. The community has been forced to move several times from their locations in Phnom Penh as the land becomes more valuable. They fear that their current home, just behind a new luxurious hotel under construction at the Chroy Changva district is only temporary and that they would have to move again soon. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)