A girl smiles during the celebration of Holi at the Art Department of the University of Dhaka in Dhaka, Bangladesh on March 8, 2023. (Photo by Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters)

A girl and boy carry a basket of fish in Kyaukpyu township, Rakhine state, Myanmar October 6, 2015. (Photo by Soe Zeya Tun/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 flies a kite in the afternoon in Dhaka, Bangladesh on August 3, 2022. (Photo by Mohammad Ponir Hossain/Reuters)

A girl goes to school just before sunrise in Frankfurt, Germany, Wednesday, December 11, 2019. (Photo by Michael Probst/AP Photo)

Girls during a class at the Teire Irish dance school in Moscow, Russia on March 15, 2019. (Photo by Sergei Karpukhin/TASS)

A retired man (L) looks toward two girls wearing miniskirts, July 13, 1969 in Nice, France. (Photo by AFP Photo)