Police women ride Segways as they patrol at Guangzhou South Railway Station on Jaunary 4, 2012 in Guangzhou, China. (Photo by ChinaFotoPress/ChinaFotoPress via Getty Images)

Actor Robert De Niro presents the Guy Movie Hall of Fame award onstage during Spike TV's 5th annual 2011 “Guys Choice” Awards at Sony Pictures Studios on June 4, 2011 in Culver City, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

Five year old Michael Esteban and his mother Kari Esteban, crawl through a 40-foot long, 4-foot high replica of a human colon on July 11, 2003 in Seattle. The colon is used to educate people on colorectal cancer. (Photo by Ron Wurzer/Getty Images)

Yoga Studio for ultra-Orthodox located at Ramat Beit Shemesh Nachal zohar 4/8, Israel. Separate classes for men, women and children. Occupations look quite funny... (Photo by Michal Fattal)

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)

Workers use a boat to recover supplies from a flooded grain elevator May 4, 2011 in Caruthersville, Missouri. Heavy rains have left the ground saturated, rivers swollen, and has caused widespread flooding in Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky and Arkansas. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

In this photo illustration a plastic carrier bag is blown along the road by the wind on March 4, 2008 in Birmingham, England. (Photo illustration by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Rowan Atkinson poses with Shaolin Monks at the “Johnny English Reborn” world premiere at The Entertainment Quarter on September 4, 2011 in Sydney, Australia. (Photo by Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images)