Lopez Cardona of Cuba and Oleksandr Khyzhniak of Ukraine appear inseparable in the 80kg semi-final on August 4, 2024, but it was Khyzhniak who progressed to the final. (Photo by Peter Cziborra/Reuters)

An American white pelican takes flight on the island of Petatan in the municipality of Cojumatlan de Regules, Michoacan state, Mexico on February 23, 2024. The island becomes home to the pelicans during the winter, when they travel from the north of the United States and the south of Canada to the warmer waters of Lake Chapala in Mexico. The birds are a tourist attraction and people gather on the island's boardwalk to feed them and watch them fly. (Photo by Enrique Castro/AFP Photo)

A man reacts as he holds the equipment used by Palestinian cameraman Hussam al-Masri, who was a contractor for Reuters, at the site where he was killed along with other journalists and people in Israeli strikes on Nasser hospital, in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, in this still image taken from a video shot by Reuters contractor Hatem Khaled, who was wounded shortly afterwards in another strike while he was filming the site on August 25, 2025. (Photo by Hatem Khaled/Reuters)

A pangolin carries its baby at a Bali zoo, Indonesia, Thursday, June 19, 2014. The pangolin baby was born on May 31. (Photo by Firdia Lisnawati/AP Photo)

“DC3 Wreck”. A capture of a US military DC3 plane wreck at the southern black beach in Iceland. Photo location: Iceland. (Photo and caption by Naian Feng/National Geographic Photo Contest)

Rescue workers stand near dead bodies washed ashore in Ton Sai Bay in Thailand's Phi Phi island in this December 28, 2004 file photo. On December 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.15 quake off the coast of Indonesia's Aceh province triggered an Indian Ocean tsunami that killed around 226,000 people in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand and nine other countries. (Photo by Luis Enrique Ascui/Reuters)

An infrared portrait from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope which shows generations of stars is seen in this undated NASA handout image released February 14, 2013. In this wispy star-forming region, called W5, the oldest stars can be seen as blue dots in the centers of the two hollow cavities (other blue dots are background and foreground stars not associated with the region). Red shows heated dust that pervades the region's cavities, while green highlights dense clouds. (Photo by NASA/Reuters/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian/Handout)

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)