A woman doing yoga at a fountain, in downtown Stuttgart, Germany, Thursday, June 22, 2017. Weather forecasts predict hot summer weather as well as thunderstorms for some parts of Germany. (Photo by Marijan Murat/DPA via AP Photo)

Cats gather in front of a house damaged by shelling in the town of Dokuchayevsk, south of Donetsk, February 12, 2015. (Photo by Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)

In this Monday, March 16, 2015 photo, Syrian refugee Samira Helal, 17, who is two months pregnant, poses for a portrait at inside her tent at an informal tented settlement near the Syrian border, on the outskirts of Mafraq, Jordan. Nearly 3.8 million Syrians have fled their country and are now registered as refugees, according to the U.N. Most face increasingly desperate circumstances. (Photo by Muhammed Muheisen/AP Photo)

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 stuffed rabbit doll sits among children's beds standing in the abandoned kindergarten of Kopachi village located inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone on September 29, 2015 near Chornobyl, Ukraine. Kopachi, a village that before 1986 had a population of 1,114, lies only a few kilometers south of the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant, where in 1986 workers inadvertantly caused reactor number four to explode, creating the worst nuclear accident in history. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Winton Elementary fifth graders Juliana Ragan, from left, Chloe Windsor and Paisley Ganske wait backstage for their turn to perform as the Andrew Sisters during the Pearl Harbor/Veterans assembly at the school on Monday, December 7, 2015, in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. Dec. 7 is the 74th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. (Photo by Kathy Plonka/The Spokesman-Review via AP Photo)

A woman jumps as a friend (not seen) takes a photo in front of a large drawing of Pope Francis depicting him as a superhero near the Vatican January 29, 2014. The Argentinian Pope is shown taking off into air with his right fist clenched in a classic Superman style. (Photo by Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters)

A vendor (C) cuts slaughtered dogs for sale at his roadside stall in Duong Noi village, outside Hanoi December 16, 2011. While animal rights activists have condemned eating dog meat as cruel treatment of the animals, it is still an accepted popular delicacy for some Vietnamese, as well in some other Asian countries. Duong Noi is well-known as a dog-meat village, where hundreds of dogs are killed each day for sale as popular traditional food. Dog-eating as a custom is rooted in Vietnam and was developed as a result of poverty. One kilogram of dog meat costs about 130,000 dongs ($6.2). (Photo by Reuters/Kham)