A woman gets ready for her performance at the backstage of the Heart restaurant in Ibiza on June 29, 2015. Take the Spanish chefs Ferran and Albert Adria, the Cirque du Soleil founder French Guy Laliberte and contemporary artists such as Japanese Takashi Murakami. Put them together on the luxurious Mediterranean island of Ibiza and shake well to get “Heart” an innovative multi-sensory experience. The idea of provoking emotions through a collision of avant-garde creativities appeared two years ago from Adria brothers and Laliberte's passion about art and cuisine. They met a decade ago at the famous restaurant El Bulli, closed in 2011. (Photo by Jaime Reina/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)

Stuart Craig of Washington tries out a Sig Sauer 1911 model Scorpion pistol at the Sig Sauer booth at the National Shooting Sports Foundation's 34th annual Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show at the Sands Expo and Convention Center January 17, 2012 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The SHOT Show is the largest annual gathering of shooting professionals with more than 1,600 exhibitors and 30,000 attendees expected. (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images)

In this March 18, 2015 photo, Andrea, better known as Loira, which is the Portuguese word for “blonde”, poses for a portrait in an open-air crack cocaine market, known as a “cracolandia” or crackland where users can buy crack, and smoke it in plain sight, day or night, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Andrea says she is married and has a home, but she keeps returning to crackland to feed her addiction. (Photo by Felipe Dana/AP Photo)

Mikhail Kalashnikov, the father of the world's most popular assault rifle, is handed an AK-74 November 23, 2002 in Izhevsk,1000 East km. from Moscow. November 23 marked the 55th anniversary of the release of the first Kalashnikov gun. According to the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Strategic and Technologies some 70 million to 100 million Kalashnikovs have been built worldwide since 1947, compared about 7 million to Kalashnikov's Western rival the M-16 assault rifles. (Photo by Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images)

Nikolai Vasilyev, 64, dressed as Father Frost, the Russian equivalent of Santa Claus, water-skis along the Yenisei River outside the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, Russia December 19, 2017. Vasilyev, former teacher of the Siberian State Aerospace University, constructed the water skis out of plastic foam and designed the sticks to propel him forward, while travelling on the water surface. (Photo by Ilya Naymushin/Reuters)

Three cabaret dancers sit glum-faced in the Windmill Theatre's canteen upon hearing the news that the theatre's owners have sold out to a cinema company, on October 02, 1964. The theatre, which was the first to include nudity in its shows, has been able to cope with competition from a growing number of West End strip clubs. (Photo by Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

A female tourist wears a protective face mask on the street, following an outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Tokyo, Japan on March 10, 2020. (Photo by Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters)