Netherlands Antilles Sint Maarten – Boeing 747-400 of KLM in approach for the “Princess Juliana” airport on July 2, 2002. (Photo by LUPOO/Ullstein Bild via Getty Images)

A small Leatherback sea turtle heads towards the sea during the sunset at Lhoknga beach in Aceh province on February 25, 2023. (Photo by Chaideer Mahyuddin/AFP Photo)

Pedestrians look at a Maurician oil tanker Tresta Star stranded on Tremblet coast in Saint-Philippe, south-east of the French Indian Ocean island of La Reunion, on February 4, 2022 after the passage of the tropical cyclone Batsirai as the island was placed under a cyclonic red alert. (Photo by Richard Bouhet/AFP Photo)

Danab Brigade commandos and other first responders rush to evacuate passengers from a Jubba Airlines aircraft that crash-landed on July 18, 2022, at Mogadishu International Airport, Mogadishu, Somalia. (Photo by Maj. Cain Claxton/U.S. Army via AP Photo)

Bronze medallist Norway's Line Flem Hoest jumps into the water as she celebrates at the end of the women's ILCA 6 single-handed dinghy medal race during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games sailing competition at the Roucas-Blanc Marina in Marseille on August 7, 2024. (Photo by Lisi Niesner/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)

Auto worker Christopher Brower screws a component into the cab of a four-door F150 at Ford's Kansas City Assembly Plant where new aluminum intensive Ford F-Series pickups are built in Claycomo, Missouri May 5, 2015. (Photo by Dave Kaup/Reuters)

World War Two veteran Abla Begaliyev, 91, is seen in an undated handout picture (L), poses for a picture in Arashan (Top R) and at home in Kyrgyzstan April 14, 2015. Begaliyev served in the border guard cavalry from February 1942 until April 1947. Originally from Kyrgyzstan, he fought on the Ukrainian front and relocated to the border with Afghanistan at the end of World War Two. As the world marks the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Two, Reuters photographers the length and breadth of the former Soviet republics (CCCP) captured portraits of Red Army veterans, mostly now in their 80s and 90s, today and through archive pictures at the time. More than 20 million Soviet citizens were killed in the war. (Photo by Vladimir Pirogov/Reuters/Family handout (L))