Players perform during a game at the first Bubble Soccer tournament in Hitzkirch, near Lucerne, Switzerland, June 27, 2015. Bubble Soccer, also known as Zorb Soccer, is becoming increasingly popular around the world. The game is a recreation of playing soccer whilst encased in an inflated zorb which covers the players upper-body and head. (Photo by Urs Flueeler/EPA)

The mother (2nd R) of missing firefighter Xue Ning is helped by other family members as she cries outside the venue of a news conference after trying to demand for more information from government officials, following the explosions on Wednesday night at Binhai new district in Tianjin, China, August 15, 2015. (Photo by Jason Lee/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 fisherman throws a net for catching fish with his wife in Yanhu fisherman village near Yangzhou, Jiangsu province, China, 18 October 2018. (Photo by Aleksandar Plavevski/EPA/EFE)

Members of the Women's Organization to War on Styles (WOW) picket a dress shop in Berkeley, Calif., August 23, 1947, in protest to longer skirts and padded hips. They are the wives of GI students at the University of California. Left to right: Jackie Houser; Wanda Ames; Dorothy Inman; Terry Ligon; Ruth Van Arkel; Carrol Reynolds, and Barbara Carmichael. (Photo by AP Photo)

Children sit near a mosque as they wait to break the fast during the holy fasting month of Ramadan in Palu, Central Sulawesi Province, Indonesia,on April 13, 2021. (Photo by Mohamad Hamzah/Antara Foto via Reuters)

Twenty-year-old women draped in traditional kimonos gather for their “Coming-of-Age Day” ceremony at the Tokyo Disneyland in Urayasu, eastern suburb of Tokyo on January 13, 2020. (Photo by Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP Photo)

Visitors look at a plastinated human body during the “Body Worlds” exhibition by German anatomist Gunther von Hagens at a pavilion of the Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy (VDNKh) in Moscow, Russia on March 24, 2021. Head of Russian Investigative Committee Alexander Bastrykin ordered a probe of the exhibition after it sparked outrage among conservative religious groups and public figure. (Photo by Evgenia Novozhenina/Reuters)