Vegetarian 19-year-old model Courtney Stodden gets ready to serve veggie hot dogs wearing a lettuce bikini during a People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) free veggie dog handout on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, July 16, 2014. (Photo by Jim Watson/AFP Photo)

A Ka'apor Indian warrior (L) chases a logger who tried to escape after they captured him during a jungle expedition to search for and expel loggers from the Alto Turiacu Indian territory, near the Centro do Guilherme municipality in the northeast of Maranhao state in the Amazon basin, August 7, 2014. Tired of what they say is a lack of sufficient government assistance in keeping loggers off their land, the Ka'apor Indians, who along with four other tribes are the legal inhabitants and caretakers of the territory, have sent their warriors out to expel all loggers they find and set up monitoring camps in the areas that are being illegally exploited. (Photo by Lunae Parracho/Reuters)

“DC3 Wreck”. A capture of a US military DC3 plane wreck at the southern black beach in Iceland. Photo location: Iceland. (Photo and caption by Naian Feng/National Geographic Photo Contest)

China's Shang Chunsong prepares to compete in the uneven bars event of the women's individual all-around final artistic gymnastics competition at the Namdong Gymnasium Club during the 17th Asian Games in Incheon, in this September 23, 2014 file photo. (Photo by Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters)

Jiejin Qiu, who is six months pregnant with her first baby, poses underwater during a photo shoot at a local wedding photo studio in Shanghai, in this September 5, 2014 file photo. (Photo by Carlos Barria/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)

A visitor looks at pictures of French photographer Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894-1986), on July 1, 2013 during the 44thd annual Rencontres d'Arles photography festival in Arles, southern France. The event runs until September 22. (Photo by Boris Horvat/AFP Photo)

People and security members run away as Kurdish animal rights activists release a bear into the wild after rescuing bears from captivity in people homes, in Dohuk, Iraq on February 11, 2021. (Photo by Ari Jalal/Reuters)