A protester throws a stone while clashing with Mozambican riot police in Maputo on November 27, 2024. Fresh anti-government protests erupted in Mozambique on November 27, 2024 after a police vehicle mowed down a woman at a demonstration in the capital for the opposition leader disputing October elections in a deadly weeks-long standoff AFP reporters at the scene said protestors hurled stones at security forces who fired bullets and tear gas as clashes broke out after the woman was struck while standing behind a large banner of opposition leader Venancio Mondlane. (Photo by Alfredo Zuniga/AFP Photo)

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)

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)

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)

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)

“A Hadaka Matsuri (“Naked Festival”) is a type of Japanese festival, or matsuri, in which participants wear a minimum amount of clothing; usually just a Japanese loincloth (called fundoshi), sometimes with a short happi coat, and rarely completely naked. Whatever the clothing, it is considered to be above vulgar, or everyday, undergarments, and on the level of holy Japanese shrine attire. Naked festivals are held in dozens of places throughout Japan every year, usually in the summer or winter. The most famous festival is held in Okayama, where the festival originated. Every year, over 9,000 men participate in this festival”. – Wikipedia

Photo: Japanese men wear loincloths as they splash about in freezing cold water during Saidaiji Naked Festival, at Saidaiji Temple on February 18, 2012 in Okayama, Japan. (Photo by Buddhika Weerasinghe/Getty Images)

A man sits outside after an earthquake in Antakya in Hatay province, Turkey on February 20, 2023. (Photo by Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters)