The Elf on the Shelf balloon floats down Sixth Avenue during the 88th Annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York November 27, 2014. (Photo by Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

Selena Gomez, left, and Taylor Swift arrive at the MTV Video Music Awards at the Microsoft Theater on Sunday, August 30, 2015, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP 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)

As national soccer teams and the photographers who have been covering them start to trickle home from the Brazil World Cup, it’s time to revisit the “On the Sidelines” project. This Reuters Pictures project was billed as a chance for photographers to share “their own quirky and creative view of the World Cup”. Photo: People watch from outside as a dancer performs inside a bar in Porto Alegre June 21, 2014. In a project called “On The Sidelines” Reuters photographers share pictures showing their own quirky and creative view of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil. (Photo by Marko Djurica/Reuters)

Members of an Orthodox community take part in an Easter service at a church in the village of Poteryaevka, some 200 km (124 miles) southwest of the city of Barnaul in Russia's Altai region, on April 24, 2011. (Reuters/Andrei Kasprishin)

American actor Tom Cruise was seen jumping from a water taxi on the set of “Mission: Impossible 7” on October 20, 2020 in Venice, Italy. (Photo by Splash News and Pictures)

A vendor sells fish at Central Market in freezing conditions of minus 43 degrees Celsius in the city of Yakutsk, Sakha (Yakutia), Russia on December 13, 2020. The winters in Yakutsk are extremely cold and long and the summers short and warm, with temperatures sometimes rising above 30C. (Photo by Yevgeny Sofroneyev/TASS)

A craftman poses with a bamboo miniature sculpture in Hanoi on November 25, 2020. (Photo by Nhac Nguyen/AFP Photo)