A health worker dresses in a protective suit before starting to perform the coronavirus testing in an effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the Kibera slum of Nairobi, Kenya, May 26, 2020. (Photo by Baz Ratner/Reuters)

An Indian worker crosses a street holding a shovel during monsoon rains in Prayagraj, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Wednesday, July 29, 2020. (Photo by Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP Photo)

Workers pull a rope tied to a decommissioned oil rig to dismantle it at the Alang shipyard in the western state of Gujarat, India, May 29, 2018. (Photo by Amit Dave/Reuters)

A Palestinian worker carries stalks at a sugar cane farm in the southern Gaza Strip city of Khan Yunis, on October 19, 2020. (Photo by Said Khatib/AFP Photo)

Participants hang from ropes as they learn how to use safety gears at an experience centre for construction safety training in Beijing, September 5, 2014. The centre which opened in June 2014 was established to educate workers about construction safety. According to the centre, about 1,000 construction workers undergo 3-hour classes which comprises of 33 modules every month. (Photo by Kim Kyung-Hoon/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)

Two railway workers chat in front of a flower mural inside a subway station visited by foreign reporters during a government organised tour in Pyongyang, North Korea October 9, 2015. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

A man walks on the road between Nouahibou and Nouakchott, where three Spanish aid workers were abducted in Mauritania, December 3, 2009. (Photo by Rafael Marchante/Reuters)