In this photo taken Monday, April 29, 2013, carver Jackson Mbatha, 40, poses next to a an unfinished large toy giraffe he is making from pieces of discarded flip-flops, in front of a painted workshop wall at the Ocean Sole flip-flop recycling company in Nairobi, Kenya. The company is cleaning the East African country's beaches of used, washed-up flip-flops and the dirty pieces of rubber that were once cruising the Indian Ocean's currents are now being turned into colorful handmade giraffes, elephants and other toy animals. (Ben Curtis/AP Photo)

Cambridge students the morning after the Trinity and Jesus college May Balls in Cambridge, United Kingdom on June 19, 2018. Students at Cambridge University celebrate the end of the academic year with the May Balls. (Photo by South West News Service)

A Polisario fighter sits on a rock at a forward base on the outskirts of Tifariti, Western Sahara, September 9, 2016. At a rocky outpost in Western Sahara, a new generation of soldiers who have never known war are mobilising as tensions resurface in one of Africa's oldest disputes after a quarter century of uneasy peace. (Photo by Zohra Bensemra/Reuters)

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)

People visit an art installation “Alley of Flying Umbrellas” in central St. Petersburg, Russia, May 15, 2015. Art installation inspired by “Umbrella Sky Project” of Portuguese town of Agueda and was made of 500 colored umbrellas. (Photo by Anatoly Maltsev/EPA)

(From front to back) Carson, Rosie and Charlie Surfs Up compete during the World Dog Surfing Championships in Pacifica, California, on August 5, 2023. The event helps local charities raise money by sponsoring a contestant or a team, with a portion of the proceeds going to dog, environmental, and surfing nonprofit organizations. (Photo by Josh Edelson/AFP Photo)

Jubilee Class steam locomotive 45596 Bahamas crosses the Forth Bridge on its way from Edinburgh Waverley to Aberdeen on a day trip operated by The Railway Touring Company on Wednesday, April 19, 2023. (Photo by Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images)

An artist's impression of a growing supermassive black hole located in the early Universe is seen in this NASA handout illustration released on June 15, 2011. Using the deepest X-ray image ever taken, astronomers found the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. This discovery from NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought, in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies. (Photo by Reuters/NASA/Chandra X-Ray Observatory/A.Hobart)