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)

This absolute hero came to the rescue when flash floods in a World Cup city left two women stranded in their submerged cars. Here: A woman is rescued from a car after a flash flood in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia on June 19, 2018. (Photo by Lucy Nicholson/Reuters)

Cars sit abandoned in a former shopping centre in the United Nations buffer zone in central Nicosia March 12, 2014. The cars were imported from Japan to be sold at a Toyota dealership. They were stored here during the 1974 conflict and have not been moved since. (Photo by Neil Hall/Reuters)

Gabriel Berendo, a businessman and car enthusiast, drives a casket converted into a car on Sunday May 31, 2020 in Cebu city, central Philippines as he goes around streets to remind residents to stay at home as lockdown measures to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus eases next week. (Photo by AP Photo/Stringer)

A member of the Fuerza Civil (Civil Force) police unit takes part in a simulated crime situation during a media presentation to show the police model that the federal government wants for the rest of the country, at the police academy in Monterrey December 17, 2014. Fuerza Civil, a tactical team of the police unit trained by the army, was created by the Nuevo Leon government in 2011 to curb down corruption and infiltration by drug gangs in the police corps, local media reported. Promising a new law to stop the infiltration of local governments by organized crime, President Enrique Pena Nieto pledged to reform the penal system and send an proposal to Congress to unify multi-layered police forces in Mexico's 31 states. (Photo by Daniel Becerril/Reuters)

President Calvin Coolidge rides in a car during his inaugural parade in Washington, D.C., U.S. in March 1925. (Photo by Reuters/Library of Congress)

Young U.S. visitors pose for a photograph next to a vintage car in Havana March 16, 2016. (Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)