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)

Dilwyn Green, from North Wales, holds his 7 month old Gold Silkie Bantam which won a 1st prize in its breed at the Poultry Club's 2011 National Show on November 19, 2011 in Stoneleigh, England. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)

A man looks at a photograph by French photographer Robert Doisneau entitled “The Fate Line: Pablo Picasso at Vallauris, 1952” during the presentation of the photo-exhibition “Picasso, photographer's gaze”, on June 5, 2019 at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. (Photo by Lluis Gene/AFP Photo)

Drag Queens set a Guinness World Record for the longest feather boa at 1.2 miles, along 42 St, in Times Square in New York, U.S., June 20, 2019. (Photo by Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)

A journalist operate a harness with multiple recording devices capable of recording and live streaming outside the Great Hall of the People where the opening session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) was held in Beijing, China, Friday, March 3, 2017. Thousands of delegates have gathered at the Chinese capital for the opening of the annual session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, which advises the rubberstamp parliament, whose annual session begins Sunday. (Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

Festival crowd enjoying the weather on Day 1 of Reading Festival on August 25, 2017 in Reading, England. (Photo by Dean Fardell/Barcroft Images)

A Boeing 777-300 from Swiss International Airlines lands on a foggy morning at Zurich Airport, on Friday, October 13, 2017, in Zurich, Switzerland. The high humidity renders the air vortex visible. (Photo by Christian Merz/Keystone via AP Photo)

An exhausted Rohingya refugee woman touches the shore after crossing the Bangladesh-Myanmar border by boat through the Bay of Bengal, in Shah Porir Dwip, Bangladesh, September 11, 2017. (Photo by Danish Siddiqui/Reuters)