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)

“The 2008 Sichuan earthquake or the Great Sichuan Earthquake was a deadly earthquake that measured at 8.0 Ms and 7.9 Mw occurred at 14:28:01 CST (06:28 UTC) on Monday, May 12, 2008 in Sichuan province of China, killing an estimated 68,000 people”. – Wikipedia

Photo: A woman cries as she cannot find her 4-year-old daughter and husband on the top of the ruins of a destroyed school in earthquake-hit Beichuan county, Sichuan province, May 17, 2008. (Photo by Jason Lee/Reuters)

Rick Sorenson, owner of the Rio Ramaza Marina, wades in the Sacramento River after securing an old paddlewheel boat on his property as the river makes its way up the levee on Garden Highway in Sacramento, Calif., Monday, January 9, 2017. (Photo by Hector Amezcua/The Sacramento Bee via AP Photo)

A protester pours Coca-Cola on the face of a comrade to diminish the effects of tear gas during a crackdown by security forces on a demonstration against the military coup in Yangon's Thaketa township on March 19, 2021. (Photo by AFP Photo/Stringer)

Men from the Kenyan Maasai tribe perform a traditional jumping-ritual among fellow members of a common age-set as they observe a rite of passage to mark the transition of an age-set to cultural junior elder from Moran (Maasai for warrior age-set) at a manyatta or traditional homestead built specifically for the ceremony near Lemek town within the Masai-Mara National Reserve ecosystem in Narok county February 27, 2021. (Photo by Tony Karumba/AFP Photo)

Tourists enjoy blooming cherry blossoms at China Pharmaceutical University on March 22, 2021 in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province of China. (Photo by Yang Bo/China News Service via Getty Images)

A man carries an injured girl after what activists said were five air strikes by forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad in Douma, eastern al-Ghouta, near Damascus September 11, 2014. (Photo by Bassam Khabieh/Reuters)

Somalis remove the body of a man killed in a blast in the capital Mogadishu, Somalia Saturday, October 14, 2017. A huge explosion from a truck bomb has killed at least 20 people in Somalia's capital, police said Saturday, as shaken residents called it the most powerful blast they'd heard in years. (Photo by Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP Photo)