Bad Christmas gift makes the pretty girl look disappointed in x-mas time under the christmas tree. (Photo by pixelrain/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

Girls stand on the rocks consulting a magazine as they carry their trays with fruits for sell, in Dakar, Senegal on February 28, 2021. (Photo by Zohra Bensemra/Reuters)

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 girl sticks out her tongue during snowfalls on a street in Hefei, Anhui province February 13, 2014. (Photo by Reuters/Stringer)

A girl poses in her costume during a Halloween party at a mall in Quezon city, Metro Manila October 24, 2015. (Photo by Ezra Acayan/Reuters)

A girl pulls her sister in a discarded basket in the Rashidabad neighborhood of Peshawar, Pakistan October 18, 2015. (Photo by Khuram Parvez/Reuters)

A girl takes pictures after opening ceremony at Shanghai Disney Resort in Shanghai, China, June 16, 2016. (Photo by Aly Song/Reuters)

An internally displaced Afghan girl plays near their shelter at a refugee camp in Kabul January 13, 2015. (Photo by Omar Sobhani/Reuters)