Tour de France hostess wear face masks prior to the start of the first stage of the Tour de France cycling race over 156 kilometers (97 miles) with start and finish in Nice, southern France, Saturday, August 29, 2020. (Photo by Christophe Ena/AP Photo)

Workers lay out hundreds of bundles of dyed joss sticks to cure in the sun in Hanoi, Vietnam in the last decade of September 2024. They will next be coated with incense powder made from Canarium sap and charcoal. (Photo by Piyush Paul/Solent News)

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)

Eight-year-old handicapped Chinese girl Qian Hongyan crawls with two home-made props and part of a basketball at Zhuangxia Village on January 5, 2005 in Luliang County of Qujing City, Yunnan Province, China. The girl who lost both of her legs in a traffic accident in 2000 at the age of three, struggles to live her life with a basketball as an underprop, “walking” between school and home by herself. The girl's story is widely reported in the country, and experts from China Rehabilitation Research Center has come to Qian's home to help her for rehabilitative treatment early 2005. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)

West Bromwich Albion's Saido Berahino (front) is challenged by Manchester City's Fernandinho during their English Premier League soccer match at The Hawthorns in West Bromwich, central England December 4, 2013. (Photo by Eddie Keogh/Reuters)

A huge supercell dominates the Texas skyline like an atomic bomb explosion on April 11, 2015 in Lubbock, Texas. A huge supercell dominates the Texas skyline like an atomic bomb explosion. These incredible images were taken on April 11th, by photographer Darin Kuntz who has spent in his entire life in so-called Tornado Alley. And Darin confirmed that he snapped the storm standing in his backyard in Lubbock, Texas. (Photo by Darin Kuntz/Barcroft Media)

A motorist holds on to a post as she braves high winds and rain of Super Typhoon Meranti in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan, 14 September 2016. The storm is the strongest recorded since Super Typhoon Haiyan developed in 2013. (Photo by Ritchie B. Tongo/EPA)

Sister Rebecca Leis pours low-gluten alter bread batter into a machine that bakes the thin bread at the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration monastery in Clyde, Missouri, December 18, 2014. The Sisters have made communion wafers since 1910 and began making a low-gluten version in 2003 and have gone from 143 customers in 2004 to more than 11,000 customers from around the world. (Photo by Dave Kaup/Reuters)