A devotee sits with lighted oil lamps while offering prayers during the “Dashain”, Hinduism's biggest religious festival in Bhaktapur October 3, 2014. Hindus in Nepal celebrate victory over evil during the festival by flying kites, feasting, playing swings, sacrificing animals and worshipping the Goddess Durga as well as other gods and goddess as part of celebrations held throughout the country. (Photo by Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters)

Residents with their empty containers crowd around a municipal tanker to fetch water in New Delhi, India, February 22, 2016. The Indian army has taken control of a canal that supplies three-fifths of Delhi's water, the state's chief minister said on Monday, raising hope that a water crisis in the metropolis of more than 20 million people can be averted. (Photo by Anindito Mukherjee/Reuters)

A Cambodian resident wearing a mask attends a ceremony at Pring Ka-Ek village on the outskirts of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, 09 June 2016. Villagers organized a ceremony to continue their local traditions by paying respect to the Neakta Pring Ka-Ek (Spirit house) to prevent them from diseases and to achieve abundant rice harvests and other agricultural yields. (Photo by Mak Remissa/EPA)

A local youth, front right, scares pupils on a street as he takes part in a ceremony to exorcize evil spirits and pray for rain amid the rice planting season at Pring Ka-ek village, northwest of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Friday, May 22, 2015. Cambodia is a country which heavily relies on agriculture as over 80 percent of its 14 million people are farmers, growing rice as their main crop. (Photo by Heng Sinith/AP Photo)

A man, right, throws a chair at a business window as another man tries to restrain a woman attempting to stop the damage, after march to City Hall for Freddie Gray, Saturday, April 25, 2015 in Baltimore. Gray died from spinal injuries about a week after he was arrested and transported in a police van. (Photo by Alex Brandon/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)

Demonstrators throw fire bombs to riot police during violent protests in central Athens February 12, 2012. (Photo by Milos Bicanski/Getty Images)

A violent eruption spews ash more than a kilometer into the sky above Mount Etna in Sicily on February 23, 2021. (Photo by Marco Restivo/Barcroft Studios via Getty Images)