Armed police officers and soldiers strengthen their training in seawater in Fangchenggang City, Guangxi Province, China on July 24, 2023. (Photo by Costfoto/NurPhoto/Rex Features/Shutterstock)

In more “raccoons are getting more like us” news, a drunk raccoon was found in a liquor store in Virginia, US in the first decade of December 2025. The animal had got into the shop via some loose ceiling tiles, knocked bottles of spirits off the shelves, lapped up the contents and passed out in the toilets. Once it had sobered up, it was released back into the wild – no doubt with a crashing hangover. (Photo by AP Photo)

A combination photo shows the faces of various attendees of New York Comic Con in Manhattan, New York, October 8, 2015. The event draws thousands of costumed fans, panels of pop culture luminaries and features a sprawling floor of vendors in a space equivalent to more than three football fields at the Jacob Javits Convention Center on Manhattan's West side. (Photo by Andrew Kelly/Reuters)

The northern lights, or aurora borealis, appear in the sky over the Bamburgh lighthouse at Stag Rock in Northumberland, England on September 28, 2016. (Photo by Owen Humphreys/PA Wire via ZUMA Press)

Kyrgyz men on horseback compete during their traditional game of “Oodarysh” during the celebrations of the 90th anniversary formation of the Chui region in the village of Kuntu some 20 kms from Bishkek on May 27, 2016. (Photo by Vyacheslav Oseledko/AFP 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 destroyed tank sits by the side of a road leading to Abi Adi, in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia, on Tuesday, May 11, 2021. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front was on top of a coalition that ruled Ethiopia for nearly three decades. That changed in 2018, when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed rose to power as a reformist. Abiy alienated the TPLF with efforts to make peace with its archenemy, Eritrea, and rid the federal government of corruption. (Photo by Ben Curtis/AP Photo)

A military cadet refreshes her lipstick before the National Day parade in Bucharest, Romania, Friday, December 1, 2023. Tens of thousands of people turned out in Romania's capital on Friday to watch a military parade that included troops from NATO allies to mark the country's National Day. (Photo by Vadim Ghirda/AP Photo)