Kids jump off the breakwater into the ocean ahead the Fourth of July holiday in Gloucester, Massachusetts, U.S., July 3, 2023. (Photo by Brian Snyder/Reuters)

American singer-songwriter Chloe Bailey in the first decade of April 2024 shows off her assets in an orange bikini. (Photo by chloebailey/Instagram)

Commuters hang off a local passenger train in the morning in Colombo, Sri Lanka September 8, 2016. (Photo by Dinuka Liyanawatte/Reuters)

An Afghan boy jumps off the turret of a Soviet tank on a hilltop on the the outskirts of Kabul, Sunday, March, 4, 2018. (Photo by Rahmat Gul/AP Photo)

English actress Helen Flanagan showed off her boob job in a sultry social snap in the last decade of March 2023. (Photo by Instagram)

English-Albanian singer and songwriter Dua Lipa shows off her end-of-summer body in the last decade of August 2023. (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 CIT guard carries his gun handgun while bringing a bag containing cash inside an armoured vehicle during a money collection in Johannesburg's CBD, on December 8, 2020. As the Christmas festive season approaches, cash-in-transit (CIT) companies are gearing up as they continue to be target of crime, with about 3000 money vans traveling daily nationwide. Despite the COVID-19 lockdown, there have been 260 cash-in-transit heist incidents in South Africa this year, with 19 CIT crew members killed. Cash-in-transit heists in the country are often military-style planned operations with criminals recurring to bomb making and assault rifles attacks. (Photo by Michele Spatari/AFP Photo)