In this Thursday, June 14, 2018, file photo, students wear virtual reality goggles during a science class at Pyongyang Teachers' University, a teacher training college, in Pyongyang, North Korea. (Photo by Dita Alangkara/AP Photo)

Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are seen during the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina November 30, 2018. G20 powers open two days of summit talks on Friday after a stormy buildup dominated by tensions with Russia and US President Donald Trump's combative stance on trade and climate fears. (Photo by Marcos Brindicci/Reuters)

Dancers perform during a general rehearsal of “Kreatur” (Creature) by German choreographer Sasha Waltz in collaboration with artist and fashion designer Iris van Herpen and light designer Urs Schoenebaum in Berlin, Germany on June 8, 2017. (Photo by Stefanie Loos/Reuters)

Confiscated rare and protected wildlife products such as these stuffed Sumatran tiger skins are burned and destroyed during a ceremony by government forestry and wildlife officials in Banda Aceh, Aceh province, Indonesia May 23, 2016 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. (Photo by Irwansyah Putra/Reuters/Antara Foto)

The waning moon is setting over the mountain “Les Cornettes de Bise” located at the border of the Haute-Savoie and the Valais canton of Switzerland in the Chablais Alps, photographed from Glutieres, January 7, 2015. (Photo by Anthony Anex/EPA)

A miner with a donkey makes his way through the low and narrow tunnel leading out of a coal mine in Choa Saidan Shah in Punjab province, April 29, 2014. Workers at this mine in Choa Saidan Shah dig coal with pick axes, break it up and load it onto donkeys to be transported to the surface. Employed by private contractors, a team of four workers can dig about a ton of coal a day, for which they earn around $10 to be split between them. The coalmine is in the heart of Punjab, Pakistan's most populous and richest province, but the labourers mostly come from the poorer neighbouring region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. (Photo by Sara Farid/Reuters)

(L-R) Recording artists Jessie J, Ariana Grande, and Nicki Minaj perform onstage during the 2014 MTV Video Music Awards at The Forum on August 24, 2014 in Inglewood, California. (Photo by Michael Buckner/Getty Images)

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)