This photo taken on July 19, 2020 shows a security guard looking at his smartphone while water is released from the Three Gorges Dam, a gigantic hydropower project on the Yangtze river, to relieve flood pressure in Yichang, central China's Hubei province. Rising waters across central and eastern China have left over 140 people dead or missing, and floods have affected almost 24 million since the start of July, according to the ministry of emergency management. (Photo by AFP Photo/China Stringer Network)

A Palestinian woman reacts after inhaling tear gas fired by Israeli forces during a protest marking Land Day and the first anniversary of a surge of border protests, at the Israel-Gaza border fence, in the southern Gaza Strip on March 30, 2019. (Photo by Ashraf Abu Amrah/Reuters)

Supporters of Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro take part in a rally in support of the government in Caracas, Venezuela on May 20, 2019. (Photo by Ivan Alvarado/Reuters)

Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Polly Mellon, and Christy Turlington, The Fashion Group International's 6th Annual “Night of 100 Stars” at the The Plaza Hotel in New York City, New York on October 29, 1989. (Photo by Ron Galella/WireImage)

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 March 18, 2015 photo, Andrea, better known as Loira, which is the Portuguese word for “blonde”, poses for a portrait in an open-air crack cocaine market, known as a “cracolandia” or crackland where users can buy crack, and smoke it in plain sight, day or night, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Andrea says she is married and has a home, but she keeps returning to crackland to feed her addiction. (Photo by Felipe Dana/AP Photo)

This photo taken on November 1, 2020 shows tourists taking photographs of the figure of an elephant made of rice straw in an amusement park on the shores of Huay Tueng Thao lake outside Chiang Mai. (Photo by Mladen Antonov/AFP Photo)

This photo provided by the Alameda County Sheriff's Office shows a man who was possibly trying to burglarize an abandoned Chinese restaurant in San Lorenzo, Calif., trapped in a grease vent before he was rescued Wednesday, December 12, 2018. Officials say he had been trapped for two days. Deputies and firefighters were called to the vacant building on Wednesday after someone heard cries for help. The sheriff tweeted that the man was trespassing and possibly trying to burglarize the empty restaurant. (Photo by Alameda County Sheriff's Office via AP Photo)