Villagers gather long grass in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam in the first decade of February 2024. The grasses are used as an alternative for plastic products such as baskets. (Photo by Natnattcha Chaturapitamorn/Solent News)

A basket of olives sits in an olive tree field in La Rinconada, near the Andalusian capital of Seville September 24, 2012. (Photo by Marcelo del Pozo/Reuters)

An indigenous woman kicks the ball during a Mayan ball game match in Tecpan, Guatemala on March 23, 2024. Dressed in shorts, girdle and uncovered torso, members of eleven teams from the Guatemalan indigenous departments of Chimaltenango, Quiche, Solola and Quetzaltenango, as well as one from El Salvador, commemorated the March equinox with a tournament of the ancestral Mayan ball game on Saturday. (Photo by Photo by Johan Ordonez/AFP Photo)

A recently hatched baby Egret bird seen in a nest at the Gatorland Bird Rookery in Kissimmee, Florida on March 17, 2022. Gatorland is known as The Alligator Capital of the World and has a 10 acre natural bird rookery. (Photo by Ronen Tivony/SOPA Images/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

Actress Liv Tyler poses for a portrait during the 2012 Sundance Film Festival at the Getty Images Portrait Studio at T-Mobile Village at the Lift on January 21, 2012 in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Larry Busacca/Getty Images)

Model Yasmine Petty arrives on the Life Ball plane on May 15, 2015 in Vienna, Austria. The Life Ball, an annual charity ball raising funds for HIV & AIDS projects, will take place on May 16, 2015 at the city hall in Vienna. (Photo by Monika Fellner/Getty Images)

Debutantes are photographed at the 68th International Debutante Ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York, New York, USA, 29 December 2022. The International Debutante Ball is a traditional family occasion in the New York social season. The ball provides an exciting social setting in which young women and men from all over the world meet one another, have a wonderful time, and form lasting friendships. This year's debutantes represent Belgium, England, France, Greece, Iran, Scotland, and five American states. (Photo by Peter Foley/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)