American Sniper|Los Angeles National Cemetery — Rows That Stood In for Texas

A folded flag, a rifle volley, a widow who cannot look at the coffin. The film's graveside scenes needed a national cemetery, and it used the Los Angeles National Cemetery at 950 South Sepulveda Boulevard in West Los Angeles — not Texas, where Chris Kyle was actually buried in the Texas State Cemetery in Austin in February 2013, after a funeral procession that ran two hundred miles from Dallas.

The Los Angeles ground has its own weight. It opened in 1889 as the burial place for the Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Volunteer Soldiers, the Civil War veterans' home that became the West Los Angeles VA campus across the road. Roughly 88,000 people lie here. Medal of Honor recipients from the Indian Wars are in the same lawns as men killed at Bataan. The cemetery closed to new casket burials in 1978, which means the rows have been complete and unchanging for nearly half a century — part of why it photographs the way it does.

It is open daily and free. Enter from Sepulveda, park inside, and walk to the older section near the flagpole where the stones are marble rather than granite and the carving has gone soft.

Traffic on the 405 is loud enough to hear from every part of the lawn. That never stops, and after a while it stops mattering. Photo: representative national cemetery headstones.