A woman tour skates on the frozen lake of Orlangen, south of Stockholm, Sweden, on December 23, 2016. Tour skating is recreational long distance ice skating on natural ice particularly popular in the Nordic countries. (Photo by Tobias Roestlund/AFP Photo/TT News Agency)

People affected by Hurricane Maria bathe in water piped from a creek in the mountains, in Naranjito, Puerto Rico, Thursday, September 28, 2017. Residents of the area drive to the pipes to bathe because they were left without water supplies by the damage caused by Hurricane Maria. The pipe was set up by a neighbor who ran it from a creek in his property to the side of the road in order to help those left without water. (Photo by Ramon Espinosa/AP Photo)

A Maori soldier runs as New Zealand's soldiers march down the Champs Elysees in Paris during a rehearsal of the annual Bastille Day military parade on July 12, 2016. (Photo by Thomas Samson/AFP Photo)

In this March 20, 2016 photo, Maj. Mohammed Hussein, an officer with Iraq's elite counterterrorism forces, shows a photo of a slain Islamic State group militant still wearing in a suicide vest, taken during fighting that freed the city of Ramadi from IS control earlier this year. As they fled, the militants destroyed some buildings and booby-trapped others with explosives, leaving behind an empty prize for government forces retaking the city. (Photo by Maya Alleruzzo/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 Palestinian protester sets fire to himself as he throws a molotov cocktail during clashes with the members of the Israeli armed forces in the West Bank city of Hebron, 13 October 2015. The past 12 days have seen the worst spell of street violence in Israel and the Palestinian areas in years, stirred in part by Muslim anger over perceived changes to the status quo observed at a disputed Jerusalem holy site. Sixteen Palestinians from the West Bank and Jerusalem have been killed, but more than half of them have been attackers shot dead after or during attempts to stab Israelis. (Photo by Abed Al Hashlamoun/EPA)

People cool off in a fountain outside the Southbank Centre on June 30, 2015 in London, England. The UK is currently experiencing a heatwave, with temperatures of 35 degree celsius forecast tomorrow in some parts of the country. The extreme heat has already seen train cancellations and a health warning has been issued. (Photo by Rob Stothard/Getty Images)

Mahouts return home with their elephants carrying grass to feed them on the eve of the rhino census in Kaziranga National Park in Assam state, India, 24 March 2015. Kaziranga will be closed to visitors for the next two days for a census of the rhinos commencing 25 March, in a previous census in 2013 in the park the population of the Indian rhinos was 2329. (Photo by EPA/Stringer)