An Indian street vendor selling bananas naps on his fruit cart at the roadside in New Delhi on June 3, 2015. (Photo by Money Sharma/AFP Photo)

In this April 14, 2018 photo, National Ballet of Cuba dancer Daniela Gomez Perez stands on point as she poses outside the Capitol in Havana, Cuba. Gomez, who says Cubans love dancing, trusts the next generation of leaders will continue such traditions and that art will continue to be the engine of Cuban society. Gomez said she is proud to represent Cuba during a dance trip in May to Washington, Tampa and Chicago, and that the Cuban state has always supported dance. (Photo by Ramon Espinosa/AP Photo)

A handout photo made available by the Red Bull Press Office shows Italian pilot Dario Costa in action as he flying through the Catalca Tunnel in Istanbul, Turkey, 04 September 2021. Costa set a new world record for the longest tunnel flown through with an aeroplane marking 1,610 metres. (Photo by Nuri Yilmazer Handout/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

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 man wearing a protective mask poses for a picture with a giant Jade Rabbit installation ahead of celebrations for the Mid-Autumn Festival, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on September 18, 2020. (Photo by Lim Huey Teng/Reuters)

Police detain a woman protesting against the court verdict for Yuliy Boyarshinov, and Viktor Filinkov, members of a left-wing group Set (Network) at the Western regional military court in St.Petersburg, Russia, Monday, June 22, 2020. A Russian military court convicted two members of a left-wing youth group of terrorism Monday and sentenced them to prison terms of five and a half and seven years, in a case that human rights groups called fabricated and based on coerced testimony. (Photo by Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo)

A woman stands in front of a mask-clad lion statue outside a department store in Tokyo's Ginza district on January 18, 2022, as Japan reported a record high of new Covid-19 infections fuelled by the Omicron variant. (Photo by Philip Fong/AFP Photo)

A flying lemur glides through the air in West Java, Indonesia in the first decade of October 2023. The photographer said the animal veered away from him at the last minute. (Photo by Dzul Dzulfikri/Animal News Agency)