German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier struggles with his glasses and face mask as he attends a press conference after visiting the Salzburg Festival in Salzburg, Austria, Saturday, August 22, 2020. (Photo by Kerstin Joensson/AP Photo)

A couple embraces at the railway station in Kramatorsk, on May 20, 2023, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by Sergey Shestak/AFP Photo)

Walkers marvel at a fog bow over Curbar Edge, Derbyshire in the last decade of October 2023. The phenomenon is similar to a rainbow, but because the water droplets that cause fog are so small, its colours are very weak. (Photo by Richard Bowring/Animal News Agency)

Papier-mache sculptures, also known as “ninots”, burn during the “Nit de la Crema” (Fire Night) of the Fallas Festival in Valencia, eastern Spain, 19 March 2024. Fallas is a fortnight-long fiesta in which installations of parodic papier-mache, cardboard, and wooden sculptures are traditionally burnt every year on the last day of the event in the so-called “Crema” to end the festivities. (Photo by Biel Alino/EPA/EFE)

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)

Pakistani supporters of cricketer-turned politician Imran Khan and Canadian cleric Tahir ul Qadri beat a riot policeman during an anti-government protest in Islamabad on September 1, 2014. Hundreds of protesters trying to topple Pakistan's government briefly seized the state broadcaster on September 1, intensifying the political crisis gripping the nuclear-armed nation. Deadly clashes since the weekend have raised the spectre of military intervention which gained ground after one disillusioned opposition leader said the protesters were acting according to a plan devised by the army. (Photo by Aamir Qureshi/AFP Photo)

A spectator waits for the start of the Jeremy Scott show during Fashion Week in New York, Thursday, February 8, 2018. (Photo by Andres Kudacki/AP Photo)

A member of the National Gendarmerie Intervention Group (GIGN) deactivates a bomb from a supposed terrorist during a training exercise in the event of a terrorist attack in collaboration with Recherche Assistance Intervention Dissuasion (RAID) and Research and Intervention Brigades (BRI) in presence of the French Interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve at la Gare Montparnasse, in central Paris on April 20, 2016. (Photo by Miguel Medina/Reuters)