An image from House Television shows Republican John Rose speaking on the floor of the House of Representatives as his son Guy makes a face in Washington DC, US on June 4, 2024. (Photo by AP Photo)

Clara Macaroni, 3, rests on her father's prize-winning Shorthorn cow before a parade at the opening ceremony for the Rural Society's annual exposition in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sunday, July 28, 2024. (Photo by Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)

A fisherman paddles on a makeshift raft as a child swims behind him in Gaza City's main fishing harbour on September 7, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. (Photo by Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP 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)

A three-month-old Sumatran tiger cub named “Bandar” shows his displeasure after being dunked in the tiger exhibit moat for a swim reliability test at the National Zoo in Washington, on November 6, 2013. All cubs born at the zoo must take a swim test before being allowed to roam in the exhibit. Bandar passed his test. (Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press)

Mikhail Kalashnikov, the father of the world's most popular assault rifle, is handed an AK-74 November 23, 2002 in Izhevsk,1000 East km. from Moscow. November 23 marked the 55th anniversary of the release of the first Kalashnikov gun. According to the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategic and Technologies some 70 million to 100 million Kalashnikovs have been built worldwide since 1947, compared about 7 million to Kalashnikov's Western rival the M-16 assault rifles. (Photo by Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images)

Jack, a Lurcher from Dogs Trust Salisbury, walks past a window display of models in a Dogs Trust shop window in Salisbury, as part of a campaign to discourage the impulse buying of dogs ahead of Valentine's Day, on February 10, 2014. (Photo by Matt Alexander/PA Wire)

The moon illuminates the snow-covered Concordia, the confluence of the Baltoro and Godwin-Austen glaciers, near the world's second highest mountain the K2 (8,000 meters) in the Karakoram mountain range in Pakistan September 6, 2014. While other parts of Pakistan and northern India were flooded, Concordia in the Karakoram mountain range was covered with a seasonally unusual amount of snow. Geographically, Pakistan is a climbers paradise. It rivals Nepal for the number of peaks over 7,000 meters and is home to the world's second tallest mountain, K2, as well as four of the world's 14 summits higher than 8,000 meters. (Photo by Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters)