A girl plays in a waterlogged street following a heavy monsoon rainfall in Mumbai on June 9, 2021. (Photo by Sujit Jaiswal/AFP Photo)

Girls stand on the rocks consulting a magazine as they carry their trays with fruits for sell, in Dakar, Senegal on February 28, 2021. (Photo by Zohra Bensemra/Reuters)

English singer and songwriter Dua Lipa photographs herself as an “Albanian girl in Albania” in the second decade of August 2022. (Photo by dualipa/Instagram)

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 holds a girl as she tries to escape when she realised she is to to be married, about 80 km (50 miles) from the town of Marigat in Baringo County, Kenya, December 7, 2014. As Pokot tradition dictates, the future husband arrived to her family home with a group of men to collect the girl. The men arrived with the last settled dowry of livestock for the girl's family. In this case it was 20 goats, three camels and 10 cows, given during a period of several weeks. (Photo by Siegfried Modola/Reuters)

“The girl behind the camera and the girl in front of the camera”, May 2012. (Photo by: Mandy Rosen; Source: Flickr)

Girls sits on a bench during summer at the Central Park in New York, United States, 2011. (Photo by An Rong Xu)

Girls rest on stairs at the China Digital Entertainment Expo and Conference (ChinaJoy) in Shanghai, China July 27, 2017. (Photo by Aly Song/Reuters)