Miss Earth 2016 candidates wearing environmental statement sashes lineup during a press presentation in Manila, Philippines, 11 October 2016. Eighty three young women from around the globe converged in Manila for the international beauty event. Miss Earth is a pioneering beauty pageant that serves as a vehicle for environmental advocacy. (Photo by Mark R. Cristino/EPA)

A Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) female fighter's braid is pictured while she is carrying her weapon in Tal Samin village, north of Raqqa city, Syria November 19, 2016. (Photo by Rodi Said/Reuters)

Model feebee poses as part of art installation “Dazzle room” made by artist Shigeki Matsuyama at Room 32 fashion and design exhibition in Tokyo, Friday, February 19, 2016. Matsuyama's installation features a strong contrast of black and white, which he learned from dazzle camouflage used mainly in World War I, in Tokyo, Friday, Feb. 19, 2016. (Photo by Shuji Kajiyama/AP Photo)

Members of the Albert Battery perform a gun salute during the Anzac Day dawn service held by the Currumbin RSL on the Gold Coast in Currumbin, Australia, 25 April 2016. The Anzac day marks the landing of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) troops at Gallipoli in what is today Turkey during WWI. World War One, also called the Great War, according to official statistics cost more than 37 million military and civilian casualties between 1914 and 1918. (Photo by Glenn Hunt/EPA)

An animal advocate lays in fake blood in a replica of a meat package with a label that reads “meat” during a protest “The meat is murder” in the Bulgarian capital Sofia on May 8, 2016. (Photo by Nikolay Doychinov/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)

An Israeli spectator watches a giant T-Rex balloon during the Purim parade festival in Petah Tikva, Israel, Thursday, March 24, 2016. The Jewish holiday of Purim commemorates the Jews' salvation from genocide in ancient Persia, as recounted in the Book of Esther. (Photo by Oded Balilty/AP Photo)

Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) Police Officer Keith Flood trains with his K-9 partner Doc, a German Shepherd, inside the “warehouse room” at the new MTA Police Department Canine Training Center in Stormville, New York, U.S., June 6, 2016. (Photo by Mike Segar/Reuters)