Russian President Vladimir Putin visits the Byzantine and Christian museum in Athens, Friday, May 27, 2016. Russia's president is due in financially struggling Greece Friday for a state visit that will include a trip to a 1,000-year-old, all-male Orthodox Christian sanctuary in the north of the country. (Photo by Thanassis Stavrakis/AP Photo)

Carlos Cure holds packets of corn flour made in Colombia as he poses for a picture at a stall that sells food and staple items at a market in La Fria, Venezuela, June 2, 2016. (Photo by Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)

Workers carry sacks of coffee beans at a warehouse at the Nogales farm in Jinotega, Nicaragua January 7, 2016. Soaring temperatures in Central America due to climate change are forcing farmers to pull up coffee trees and replace them with cocoa, spurring a revival in the cultivation of a crop once so essential to the region's economy. (Photo by Oswaldo Rivas/Reuters)

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 dog sits in the shade of a mangrove tree as a woman uses a fork to dig for shellfish on the reef-mud flats of a lagoon located at South Tarawa in the central Pacific island nation of Kiribati May 23, 2013. Kiribati consists of a chain of 33 atolls and islands that stand just metres above sea level, spread over a huge expanse of otherwise empty ocean. With surrounding sea levels rising, Kiribati President Anote Tong has predicted his country will likely become uninhabitable in 30-60 years because of inundation and contamination of its freshwater supplies. (Photo by David Gray/Reuters)

An Israeli spectator watches a giant T-Rex balloon during the Purim parade festival in Petah Tikva, Israel, Thursday, March 24, 2016. The Jewish holiday of Purim commemorates the Jews' salvation from genocide in ancient Persia, as recounted in the Book of Esther. (Photo by Oded Balilty/AP Photo)

Ramoncito Campo kisses his wife Hernelie Ruazol Campo on a flooded street during a southwest monsoon that battered Manila August 8, 2012. The newly-wed couple pushed through with their scheduled wedding despite severe flooding that inundated wide areas of the capital and nearby nine provinces. (Photo by Reuters/Courtesy of Ramoncito Campo)

Wounded people walk after clashes with riot police in central Kiev February 18, 2014. Ukrainian riot police advanced on the heart of 12-week-old protests against President Viktor Yanukovich on Tuesday and security forces set a deadline to end disturbances after at least five protesters were reported killed in a day of clashes. (Photo by Vlad Sode/Reuters)