Two of the first six “neighborhood electric vehicles” (NEV) to be leased by the U.S. Army are on display during an introductory ceremony at Fort Myer January 12, 2009 in Arlington, Virginia. The Army has leased 800 of the non-tactical NEVs with a goal of 4,000 vehicles by 2011. These NEVs are manufactured by the Global Electric Motorcars division of Chrysler Corporation. With a full eight-hour charge, the NEVs can traverse 30 miles at a top speed of 25-miles-per-hour. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Dancers perform at a Carnival parade in Les Cayes, Haiti, Tuesday, February 28, 2017. Haiti's three-day Carnival festivities have brought rum-fueled parties, imaginative costumes and high-energy dance music to a southern city that's still recovering from last year's punishing Hurricane Matthew. (Photo by Dieu Nalio Chery/AP Photo)

Trucks loaded with tree trunks are burned by agents of the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, or Ibama, during an operation to combat illegal mining and logging, in the municipality of Novo Progresso, Para State, northern Brazil, November 11, 2016. When able to do their job, agents of the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, or Ibama, are decisive, punishing illegal loggers on the spot. Nearly twice the size of India, the Amazon absorbs an estimated 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, making its preservation vital in the fight to halt global warming. (Photo by Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)

In this image made from video, woman protesters march with a sign outside the building housing the Saudi consulate in Sydney, Thursday, January 10, 2019. Four women held a topless protest in Sydney on Thursday to support runaway Saudi woman Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, as Australia began considering her bid to settle in the country as a refugee. (Photo by Australia Broadcast Corporation via 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)

Shell, which is the replica of the biggest detonated Soviet nuclear bomb AN-602 (Tsar-Bomb), is on display in Moscow, Russia, August 31, 2015. The shell is part of an exhibition organized by the state nuclear corporation Rosatom. (Photo by Maxim Zmeyev/Reuters)

Volunteers stand and read the morning newspaper while “waiting for the bus” at Henley Beach on January 8, 2012 in Adelaide, Australia. Surrealist artist, Andrew Baines recruited 100 volunteers for this human installation, meant to illustrate corporate workers enjoying nature rather than waiting in a long queue for a trip to work. (Photo by Morne de Klerk/Getty Images)