Bangladeshi farmers busy to processing jute in Dhamrai outskirts of Dhaka on July 06, 2020. (Photo by Zabed Hasnain Chowdhury/ZUMA Wire/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

A Taliban fighter poses for a picture holding a flower before offering Friday noon prayers in Kabul, Afghanistan on October 1, 2021. (Photo by Bulent Kilic/AFP Photo)

A woman wearing a protective mask walks through a platform of a train station during the afternoon rush hours as the Omicron variant continues to spread, amid the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, in Jakarta, Indonesia, January 3, 2022. (Photo by Willy Kurniawan/Reuters)

(L-R) American rapper Doja Cat, Jeffrey “J” Cyrus and American singer-songwriter Bebe Rexha attend the 66th GRAMMY Awards on February 04, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by John Shearer/Getty Images for The Recording Academy)

Pausing for a selfie as plum blossoms burst into bloom in Dujiangyan City, in southwest China’s Sichuan province on February 20, 2024. (Photo by Splash News and Pictures)

Pro-Palestian protesters yell at Orlando Police Department officers after they took two protesters into custody and deployed a noxious gas into the crowd during a rally in Orlando, Fla., Saturday, May 11, 2024. (Photo by Willie J. Allen Jr./Orlando Sentinel via AP Photo)

Sunrise over the River Thames and Tower Bridge in London today morning on January 28, 2024. It has been forecast that Sahara dust will be in the atmosphere. (Photo by Alister Gooding/Picture Exclusive)

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)