Sun Rongchun, 57, exercises with an improvised cervical traction device attached to a high bar at a sports complex in Shenyang, Liaoning province, China on April 9, 2019. (Photo by Sheng Li/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)

Shemika Charles limbos under her car at Niagara Falls State Park on May 28, 2015 in Buffalo, New York. A world record holding limbo queen thinks she has become the first person to shimmy under a car. Shemika Charles amazed herself and onlookers when she bent over backwards to get underneath the SUV earlier this week. The supple 22-year-old entered the record books in 2010 when she limboed down to an incredible eight and a half inches – the height of a beer bottle. She trains for up to four hours a day to keep her body in peak condition and now travels around America performing with her family. However, regular performances put an incredible strain on her body and she sees a chiropractor once a week to have her hips realigned. Her mother was also a successful limbo dancer in her home country of Trinidad and Tobago but had to give up due to injury. (Photo by Ruaridh Connellan/Barcroft USA)

A labourer pulls a cart loaded with sacks of spices at a wholesale spice and chemical market in the old quarters of Delhi, India, December 19, 2016. Picture taken December 19, 2016. (Photo by Adnan Abidi/Reuters)

Rooftops of solar powered houses are pictured in Ota, 80 km northwest of Tokyo in this October 28, 2008 file photo. One by one, Japan is turning off the lights at the giant oil-fired power plants that propelled it to the ranks of the world's top industrialised nations. With nuclear power in the doldrums after the Fukushima disaster, it's solar energy that is becoming the alternative. Solar power is set to become profitable in Japan as early as this quarter, according to the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation (JREF), freeing it from the need for government subsidies and making it the last of the G7 economies where the technology has become economically viable. (Photo by Yuriko Nakao/Reuters)

“The Northrop Grumman (formerly Ryan Aeronautical) RQ-4 Global Hawk (known as Tier II+ during development) is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used by the United States Air Force and Navy as a surveillance aircraft”. – Wikipedia

Photo: A full-scale model of The RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned plane is displayed during a presentation at PiO Exhibition Center on March 24, 2010 in Tokyo, Japan. (Photo by Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images)

Three very colouful alpacas enjoy the hot weather at Toft Farm, Rugby, on July 19, 2013. (Photo by Caters News)

Students of Yuba Pratibha School, wearing a face shield and masks at school during a coronavirus pandemic in Kathmandu, Nepal, 26 November 2020. The head Teacher of Yuba Pratibha School, Yanga Raj Dahal, started to conduct classes for students, who can’t afford and attend online classes, with strict sanitary regime, providing also free face masks and shields for students. However majority of schools have been conducting online classes in Nepal from 19 March 2020 as part of precautionary measures against the spread of the coronavirus Covid-19. (Photo by Narendra Shrestha/EPA/EFE)