A woman jumps over a puddle as she crosses a street after a torrential downpour in the South Beach part of Miami, July 18, 2014. (Photo by Carlo Allegri/Reuters)

New York Mets' Luisangel Acuña is introduced before a baseball game against the Toronto Blue Jays, April 4, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Photo)

Member of Unifrance delegation Swiss actress Souheila Yacoub arrives for the screening of the film “Le Comte de Monte-Cristo” (The Count of Monte-Cristo) at the 77th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, southern France, on May 22, 2024. (Photo by Loic Venance/AFP Photo)

People watch as workers inflate a near-10 metre high giant spider by Singaporean artist Jackson Tan in Singapore's Marina Bay financial district on February 6, 2017. The spider is one of several inflatable creatures that will form the Art-Zoo, a section created by Singaporean artist Jackson Tan for the iLight Marina Bay annual light-art festival in the city-state. (Photo by Roslan Rahman/AFP Photo)

This unidentified teenager found Elvis Presley “too much” when he appeared at the Philadelphia Arena in Philadelphia, Pa., on April 6, 1957. (Photo by Bill Ingraham/AP Photo)

Confiscated rare and protected wildlife products such as these stuffed Sumatran tiger skins are burned and destroyed during a ceremony by government forestry and wildlife officials in Banda Aceh, Aceh province, Indonesia May 23, 2016 in this photo taken by Antara Foto. (Photo by Irwansyah Putra/Reuters/Antara Foto)

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 girl watches as Saen Dao, an eight-year-old female asian elephant, and her mahout perform underwater during a show at the Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Chonburi south of Bangkok on June 1, 2017. (Photo by Roberto Schmidt/AFP Photo)