A picturesque supercell formation in the northwest of Booker, Texas from June 2013. (Photo by Mike Olbinski/Barcroft Media)

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)

In this Wednesday, May 23, 2012 photograph, a young deer and a cat share a moment in Feench village near Jodhpur, Rajasthan state, India. (Photo by AP Photo)

Partially demolished houses stand in the Vila Autodromo slum with the Rio 2016 Olympic Park in the background in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, February 25, 2016. (Photo by Ricardo Moraes/Reuters)

A young Chinese girl kicks during a kung-fu class at Ritan Park on June 11, 2016 in Beijing, China. Ritan, meaning “sun altar”, is among the oldest parks in Beijing, built in the early 1500s during the Ming dynasty for the emperor to make sacrifices to the sun. (Photo by Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

A man runs after he tried to put himself on fire during a protest at a makeshift camp at the Greek-Macedonian border near the village of Idomeni on March 22, 2016. Greece will not be able to start sending refugees back to Turkey from March 20, 2016, the government said, as the country struggles to implement a key deal aimed at easing Europe's migrant crisis. The numbers are daunting: officials said as of Saturday there were 47,500 migrants in Greece, including 8,200 on the islands and 10,500 massed at the Idomeni camp on the Macedonian border. (Photo by Andrej Isakovic/AFP Photo)

This picture released by Turkish Cumhuriyet Daily newspaper shows Dilek Dundar (L), the wife of editor-in-chief of Turkish newspaper Cumhuriyet daily Can Dundar, trying to stop a gunman who is also being held back by a man on May 6, 2016 in Istanbul. Turkish opposition journalist Can Dundar escaped a shooting on May 5 outside a courthouse in Istanbul where he is on trial, adding police detained the assailant. Dundar, who was unharmed, was outside the courthouse during a break as the court prepared to deliver its verdict in his trial for allegedly revealing state secrets in a newspaper story. (Photo by AFP Photo/Cumhuriyet Daily Newspaper)

Children play on top of an old plane's fuselage at a dump site in Paranaque city, Metro Manila, Philippines January 21, 2017. (Photo by Ezra Acayan/Reuters)