Focus on two glasses of champagne on floor. Ardent loving couple is sitting on bed and hugging with passion on background. Romantic date concept. (Photo by Olena Yakobchuk/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

An artist performs a fire kettle show during the Mid-Autumn Festival at a night market in Beijing, Tuesday, September 17, 2024. (Photo by Andy Wong/AP Photo)

A striking spiral of golden ginkgo leaves raked with care in a private garden in Petersdorf, Brandenburg, Germany on November 2, 2025. (Photo by Patrick Pleu/dpa)

In this March 18, 2015 photo, Andrea, better known as Loira, which is the Portuguese word for “blonde”, poses for a portrait in an open-air crack cocaine market, known as a “cracolandia” or crackland where users can buy crack, and smoke it in plain sight, day or night, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Andrea says she is married and has a home, but she keeps returning to crackland to feed her addiction. (Photo by Felipe Dana/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)

A three-month-old Sumatran tiger cub named “Bandar” shows his displeasure after being dunked in the tiger exhibit moat for a swim reliability test at the National Zoo in Washington, on November 6, 2013. All cubs born at the zoo must take a swim test before being allowed to roam in the exhibit. Bandar passed his test. (Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated Press)

Steam rises from Lake Superior as the ship St. Clair comes to harbor during some of the coldest temps of the year, Sunday, December 31, 2017, at Canal Park in Duluth, Minn. The St. Clair is a self-unloader built in 1976 at Sturgeon Bay, Wis., and is 770 feet long and has 26 hatches that open into 5 cargo holds, providing a load capacity of 45,000 tons. (Photo by David Joles/Star Tribune via AP Photo)

Armed female members of the militant Palestinian group Islamic Jihad carry Kalashnikov assault rifles as they take part in a rally to protest against US President Donald Trump's decision to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, in Gaza City on December 11, 2017. (Photo by Mohammed Abed/AFP Photo)