“Pivo”, Nissan's concept car is introduced at Nissan's Gallery on September 30, 2005 in Tokyo, Japan. “Pivo” is an electric car in which the direction of the cabin moves 180 degrees, therefore, when making a turn in a different direction, it simply needs to move the cabin without moving the car. (Photo by Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images)

In this September 30, 2017 photo, people perform “transvestite target practice” to protest the killings of transvestite prostitutes during the annual LGBQT march in Asuncion, Paraguay. Advocacy groups fear the stigma and attacks against the LGBQT community could get worse now that the country's education minister has banned classes about sexual diversity in schools and even volunteered to help burn all books related to the subject. (Photo by Jorge Saenz/AP 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 father crosses a road with his twin daughters in Shanghai, China September 28, 2018. (Photo by Aly Song/Reuters)

A child plays beside an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, the day after it was immersed in the Yamuna river for the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Delhi, India September 6, 2017. (Photo by Cathal McNaughton/Reuters)

Advanced Space Suit Engineer at NASA Kristine Davis wears the xEMU prototype space suit for the next astronaut to the moon by 2024, during its presentation at NASA headquarters in Washington, U.S., October 15, 2019. (Photo by Carlos Jasso/Reuters)

Fisherman Jose Miguel Perez, whose nickname is “Taliban”, navigates the oil infested waters of Lake Maracaibo, near Cabimas, Venezuela, May 21, 2019. Nobody lives as closely with the environmental fallout of Venezuela's collapsing oil industry as the fishermen who scratch out an existence on the blackened, sticky shores of Lake Maracaibo. (Photo by Rodrigo Abd/AP Photo)

A woman wearing a gown hands out campaign leaflets to a coconut juice vendor during a Santacruzan-themed house-to-house campaign for Philippine Vice President and presidential candidate Leni Robredo, in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines, May 5, 2022. (Photo by Lisa Marie David/Reuters)