A farmer arranges vegetable at a greenhouse on January 29, 2021 in Hukou County, Jiangxi Province of China. (Photo by Zhang Yu/VCG via Getty Images)

An Argentina soccer fan watches the team lose to Saudi Arabia at a World Cup Group C soccer match, played on a large screen in the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos, Aires, Argentina, early Tuesday, November 22, 2022. (Photo by Gustavo Garello/AP Photo)

A shop assistant creates a window display in a Next store in central London December 30, 2014. British clothing retailer Next's sales rose 2.9 percent in the run up to Christmas mostly due to online and catalogue purchases, hitting the upper end of its predictions and it said full-year profit would rise by about 11.5 percent. (Photo by Neil Hall/Reuters)

Robert Price of TREWGrip LLC demonstrates a TREWGrip handheld rear-type keyboard and air mouse for Apple and Android tablets at the “CES: Unveiled”, media preview for International CES, at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas on January 5, 2014. (Photo by Robyn Beck/AFP Photo)

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)

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 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)

A demonstrator sits on the coffin containing the body of a protester who was killed during previous protests in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Monday, March 4, 2019. Protesters are angry about skyrocketing inflation and the government's failure to prosecute embezzlement from a multi-billion Venezuelan program that sent discounted oil to Haiti. (Photo by Dieu Nalio Chery/AP Photo)