Kate, Princess of Wales and her children Prince George and Princess Charlotte ride in a car behind the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II as it is pulled on a gun carriage through the streets of London following her funeral service at Westminster Abbey, Monday September 19, 2022.The Queen, who died aged 96 on Sept. 8, will be buried at Windsor alongside her late husband, Prince Philip, who died last year. (Photo by Kin Cheung/AP Photo/Pool)

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 Bangladeshi girl plays on a swing, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, December 27, 2016. (Photo by Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters)

Two girls in cosplay dresses walk in the street in Beijing on March 27, 2017. (Photo by Fred Dufour/AFP Photo)

Girls bath inside a drum on a hot summer day at a field in New Delhi, April 18, 2017. (Photo by Adnan Abidi/Reuters)

An Iranian girl walks at the Tochal ski resort, in north of Tehran, Iran on December 12, 2019. (Photo by Nazanin Tabatabaee/WANA via Reuters)

A girl carries breads on her head as she walks in the snow, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Tuesday, February 8, 2022. (Photo by Hussein Malla/AP Photo)

An Afghan girl jumps off the wall of a small cemetery in Kandahar on July 29, 2022. (Photo by Daniel Leal/AFP Photo)