Four-month-old fox cubs squaring up to each other in Walthamstow, England on August 7, 2015. (Photo by Greg Morgan/Barcroft Media)

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)

Alluvial Fan, China. A vast alluvial fan blossoms across the desolate landscape between the Kunlun and Altun mountain ranges that form the southern border of the Taklimakan Desert in China’s XinJiang Province. Image taken by the ASTER instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite on May 2nd, 2002. (Photo by NASA/GSFC/USGS EROS Data Center)

Philip Colbert poses in front of his artwork at The Gallery Hosu on March 31, 2025 in Seoul, South Korea. (Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images for Philip Colbert Studio)

A peformance artist attends an election rally for Cameroon presidential candidate for the opposition Univers party, Cabral Libii in Yaounde, Cameroon 06 October 2018. Africa's oldest president Paul Biya who has been in power since 1982 is up against eight candidates when voters go to the polls 07 October 2018. 6.9 million registered voters will head to the polls but marginalised anglophone separatists in the North West and South West of the country threaten to disrupt the elections. (Photo by Nic Bothma/EPA/EFE)