A member of Libyan forces allied with the U.N.-backed government fires a weapon on a pickup truck during a battle with Islamic State militants in Giza Bahreya, in Sirte, Libya October 27, 2016. (Photo by Hani Amara/Reuters)

An opposition fighter from the Failaq al-Rahman brigade fires a heavy machine gun in Jobar, a rebel-held district on the eastern outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus, on March 19, 2017. (Photo by Amer Almohibany/AFP Photo)

A model walks the runway wearing creations by Bianca Spender during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Australia in Sydney, Australia, 14 May 2018. (Photo by Dan Himbrechts/EPA/EFE)

A baby sloth uses his mother as a hammock while she feasts on papayas in Heredia province in Costa Rica in April 2023. (Photo by William Steele/Solent News)

“When I was 8 years old, my parents paid a smuggler to take me across the Himalayas, a weekslong walk over the mountains from Tibet to India. It was a trek that tens of thousands of other Tibetans have taken since the Dalai Lama fled a failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule. My parents must have had their reasons to send me here; they must have had the best of intentions. But 18 years later, I still don't know why they did it. They are not political people. They are small farmers who raise barley and a few yak in a rural area not far from Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. I have not seen them since I left...”. – Tsering Topgyal via The Associated Press. (Photo by Tsering Topgyal/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)

American students going wild during their Spring Break week-long recess in Cancun, Mexico on March 10, 2007. (Photo by Keystone USA/ZUMA Press/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

A woman wearing cut-off jeans and a halter-neck sun top in St Tropez, 1972. (Photo by Roy Jones)