Larry Burrows - Photographs.

One Ride with Yankee Papa 13

Larry Burrows was a British photojournalist who worked for Life magazine and documented U.S. operations in Vietnam from 1962 until his death in 1971. His assignments in Southeast Asia combined embedded flights with Marine and Army aviation units and extended ground reporting; his career included major Life photo-essays such as One Ride with Yankee Papa 13 (April 16, 1965) and The Air War (September 1966).

One Ride with Yankee Papa 13 records a specific rotary-wing operation originating from Da Nang on 31 March 1965 in which Burrows accompanied Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 163 (HMM-163) aboard a Sikorsky CH-34 to a contested landing zone; the sequence documents the downing of Yankee Papa 3, the rescue attempt by Yankee Papa 13, injuries sustained by crew members, and the immediate battlefield care rendered aboard the helicopter. The essay includes published photographs that identify individuals present during the mission (including, in published captions and institutional records, the injured pilot First Lieutenant Dale Eddy, door gunner Lance Cpl. James C. Farley, and the co-pilot James Magel) and a contemporaneous written account that situates the mission within Marine airlift operations of spring 1965.

The sequence ran as a multi-page Life feature on 16 April 1965 and was presented in colour and black-and-white plates with accompanying reportage; contemporaneous and retrospective sources identify the piece as a high-profile instance of Vietnam combat photography that conveyed casualty details from an embedded perspective and subsequently entered photographic histories of the conflict. Subsequent institutional catalogues, museum holdings, and scholarly treatments have preserved individual prints from the Yankee Papa 13 sequence and have treated the essay as a documented case study of helicopter rescue operations, casualty evacuation, and photojournalistic method in mid-1960s Vietnam.

Music
Prelude In C Major (BWV 846) (String Version)
Johann Sebastian Bach

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