A reveller from Tom Maior Samba School takes part in a carnival at Anhembi Sambadrome in Sao Paulo February 14, 2015. (Photo by Nacho Doce/Reuters)

Elephant fights off hyenas to save baby. “This is the incredible moment an elephant came to the rescue of one of its babies being attacked by a pack of hyenas. The elephant is seen charging at the hyenas to ward them off its offspring. The photos were captured by American photographer Jayesh Mehta, 47, in the Savuti region of the Chobe National Park in Botswana”. Photo: The elephant is seen charging at the hyenas to ward them off its offspring. (Photo by Jayesh Mehta/Caters News)

The Soyuz TMA-17M spacecraft carrying the International Space Station (ISS) crew blasts off from the launch pad at the Baikonur cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, July 23, 2015. The Russian rocket carries Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, U.S. astronaut Kjell Lindgen and Japan astronaut Kimiya Yui. (Photo by Shamil Zhumatov/Reuters)

Laborers work on scaffolding near a full-scale replica of the Sphinx at an unfinished movie and animation tourism theme park, in Chuzhou, Anhui province, March 27, 2015. (Photo by Reuters/China Daily)

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)

An Iraqi Kurdish Peshmerga takes part in a graduation ceremony at the Zakho military academy in the Iraqi Kurdish town of Zakho, some 500 kilometres north of Baghdad, on January 30, 2018. (Photo by Safin Hamed/AFP Photo)

A marine aims an RPG-7, a portable rocket- propelled grenade launcher, during military exercises conducted by the Russian Pacific Fleet' s naval infantry unit at the Bamburovo firing range on February 2, 2017. The drills are a part of preparations for the Suvorov Attack and Sniper Line army competitions. (Photo by Yuri Smityuk/TASS)

Soviet Army soldiers sit on their tanks in front of the Czechoslovak Radio station building in central Prague during the first day of Soviet-led invasion to then Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968. (Photo by Libor Hajsky/Reuters)