Passengers wait at the departure hall of the Beijing Railway Station in central Beijing, China January 27, 2017 as China gears up for Lunar New Year, when hundreds of millions of people head home. (Photo by Damir Sagolj/Reuters)

Gertrude “Billie” Murphy, 22, is brought in for questioning in the murder case of Michael Stopec, who was shot and killed in an apartment hotel, circa July 1927. Murphy had been friends of the married Stopec and his suspected killer Henry Guardino, 31. It is said that Stopec and Guardino were “bitter rivals for the favor of Billie” and that Murphy had tired of Guardino and was going to stay with Stopec. Murphy was also married to a man in the Joliet penitentiary. (Photo by Chicago Herald & Examiner Historical Photo)

Gorillas at Royal Burgers’ Zoo, Arnhem, Netherlands, on November 28, 2013. (Photo by Vidi Photo/Startraks Photo New York)

1st prize in the People Observed Portraits Stories category. Carla Kogelman, the Netherlands. The photo shows Hannah and Alena, two sisters living in the rural village of Merkenbrechts, Austria. (Photo by Carla Kogelman/World Press Photo)

A large Pacific sideband snail slowly crosses a rain wet road in rural Douglas County, Oregon near Elkton on Sunday, December 2, 2012. The moisture loving snail should be very content with the recent heavy rains in southwestern Oregon and northern California. (Photo by Robin Loznak)

Jury member Nicole Kidman attends the Jury Press Conference. (Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)

A giant sinkhole in Guatemala City, on May 31, 2010. More than 94,000 were evacuated as the storm buried homes under mud, swept away a highway bridge near Guatemala City and opened up several sinkholes in the capital. (Photo by Casa Presidencial/Reuters via The Atlantic)

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)