A model poses beside a Mazda MX-5 during a media presentation at the 37th Bangkok International Motor Show in Bangkok, Thailand, March 22, 2016. (Photo by Chaiwat Subprasom/Reuters)

Passionate couple having sеx in the bed. Young lovers having intimate and romantic moments in the bedroom. (Photo by Alamy Stock Photo)

A woman smokes marijuana during the annual 4/20 marijuana rally on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, April 20, 2017. (Photo by Chris Wattie/Reuters)

Libyan forces allied with the U.N.-backed government fire weapons during a battle with IS fighters in Sirte, Libya, July 21, 2016. (Photo by Goran Tomasevic/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)

Meghan Puhr participates in a virtual realty presentation during an Intel news conference before CES International, Wednesday, January 4, 2017, in Las Vegas. (Photo by John Locher/AP Photo)

Students pose for a picture with a 3- D optical illusion artwork of a devastated cityscape in Aleppo, Syria at the campus of the Meiji University in Tokyo on November 18, 2016. The Japanese branch of the human rights organisation Amnesty International displayed the artwork to encourage people to think about the Syrian civil war. (Photo by Toshifumi Kitamura/AFP Photo)

Two cocks are trained for a fight in a village in Nakhon Sawan province, Thailand January 10, 2017. (Photo by Chaiwat Subprasom/Reuters)