One Ride With Yankee Papa 13 – Larry Burrows 02

Larry Burrows

NOTE: In the spring of 1965, within weeks of 3,500 American Marines arriving in Vietnam, Larry Burrows, a 39-year-old Briton, began work on a feature for LIFE portraying the day-to-day experience of U.S. troops in the rapidly widening war. The words (Burrows’ own, transcribed from an audio recording) and photographs re-published here focus on a March 31, 1965 helicopter operation; his harrowing “report from Da Nang” was published two weeks later in LIFE. Burrows was killed, along with several other journalists, six years later, when the helicopter they were flying in was shot down over Laos in February, 1971. He was 44. Like all the pictures in this gallery, the photo above — showing Burrows attaching one of his cameras to a Marine helicopter — appeared in the original “Yankee Papa” photoessay.