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 child attends a training session in a swimming pool on July 10, 2007 in Wuhan of Hubei Province, China. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)

Passengers travel in an overcrowded train in the eastern Indian city of Patna, February 23, 2010. (Photo by Krishna Murari Kishan/Reuters)

A subway worker walks away after a train departed the station in central Pyongyang, North Korea May 7, 2016. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

A migrant boy sits on railway tracks at a train station in Tovarnik, Croatia, September 20, 2015. (Photo by Antonio Bronic/Reuters)

A woman dressed up for Halloween travels on a Metro train in São Paulo, Brazil on October 30, 2017. (Photo by Cris Faga/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

An Iraqi army cadet participates in “the leap of faith”, from a bridge as part of their training, in Baghdad, Iraq on December 15, 2023. (Photo by Ahmed Saad/Reuters)

Technicians check a CRH high-speed train at Shanghai Hongqiao High-speed train base on December 28, 2011 in Shanghai, China. China's railway stations have started today to sell tickets for the 2012 Spring Festival travel season scheduled to run between January 8th and February 16th, centred around the Chinese New Year which this year falls on January 23rd. (Photo by ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images)