American media personality and socialite Kylie Jenner in the last decade of October 2024 strips off to recreate Demi Moore's famous Striptease scene. (Photo by Greg Swales)

A member falls as Team Kazakhstan competes during the women's team pursuit speed skating final at the 9th Asian Winter Games in Harbin, China on Tuesday, February 11, 2025. (Photo by Aaron Favila/AP Photo)

Laura Halford of Wales jumps during her hoop routine as she competes in the rhythmic gymnastics individual all-around final event at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, Scotland, July 25, 2014. (Photo by Phil Noble/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)

A man in a Donald Trump mask joins hundreds of other protesters and activists as they march during a demonstration near a midtown hotel which is hosting a black-tie fund-raiser for the state Republican Party on April 14, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

A German special anti-tank gun is ready to fire during the army maneuvers in Silesia, Poland, on September 22, 1928. (Photo by AP Photo)

His own space suit, with oxygen tank, doesn't make Barney the monkey any happier as he and actor Adam West view the situation in their space capsule in Hollywood on January 24, 1964. Barney, a South American woolly monkey, is blasted into space with West, as an astronaut, in a new movie, “Robinson Crusoe on Mars”. (Photo by AP Photo)

In this October 27, 1983 file photo, soldiers brandish captured AK-47 rifles from the windows of a civilian vehicle as they drive near Point Salines Airport in St. George, Grenada. In 1983, U.S. forces invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada after accusing the government of allying itself with Communist Cuba. (Photo by Doug Jennings/AP Photo)