A Human Record of War: Life magazine, 1965

1965…The April 16 cover story in Life was a photoessay by Larry Burrows, a British journalist best known for his war photography in Vietnam.

- WILLIAM CAVERLEE

Burrows’s 21 black-and-white shots of a Marine helicopter crew on a mission near Da Nang are, by now, among the most recognizable images of the Vietnam War—14 brief pages of photographs in a popular news magazine, the record of a single day in the lives of four or five young Marines. One needs to recall that in the spring of 1965, the American escalation in Vietnam was in its early days—not far removed from the Kennedy and Eisenhower era of so called “advisers.” For that reason, Burrows’s photographs of a firefight were all the more shocking to an unaware American public.

Long before the term “embedded journalist” was coined, Burrows had attached himself to the 163rd Marine Squadron, and on March 31, 1965, he flew on one of the 17 UH-34D Sikorsky helicopters shuttling South Vietnamese infantry to a landing zone outside Da Nang.