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)

Participants hang from ropes as they learn how to use safety gears at an experience centre for construction safety training in Beijing, September 5, 2014. The centre which opened in June 2014 was established to educate workers about construction safety. According to the centre, about 1,000 construction workers undergo 3-hour classes which comprises of 33 modules every month. (Photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters)

A man disinfects the personal protection suit of a medical worker at a nucleic acid testing station, following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Beijing, China, June 16, 2022. (Photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters)

Workers tend green onion plants among nearly 1,000 acres of terracing in fields in the Majalengka Regency of West Java in Indonesia in July 2021. (Photo by Andika Oky Arisandi/Solent News)

A view of Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, a sculpture by Vera Mukhina, at the main entrance to Moscow's VDNKh exhibition center in Moscow, Russia on September 27, 2017. (Photo by Dmitry Serebryakov/TASS/Barcroft Images)

A dog dressed as UPS worker is seen during the 28th Annual Tompkins Square Halloween Dog Parade at East River Park Amphitheater in New York on October 28, 2018. (Photo by Gordon Donovan/Yahoo News)

Workers clad in a dog and a wild boar costumes, to represent the outgoing year of the dog and incoming year of the wild boar, clean windows on the side of a hotel in Tokyo on December 13, 2018. (Photo by Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP Photo)

A worker disinfects a mosque for coronavirus, in Peshawar, Pakistan, Thursday, April 2, 2020. The government imposed a nationwide lockdown to try to contain the outbreak of the virus. (Photo by Muhammad Sajjad/AP Photo)