American Sniper|San Bernardino International Airport — The Gate He Kept Walking Back Through

Four tours, four departures, four returns. The film keeps cutting between a family kitchen and a military flight line, and the flight line is San Bernardino International Airport, sixty miles east of Los Angeles at the edge of the Inland Empire.

It reads as an operational air base because it was one. This was Norton Air Force Base, home to the 63rd Military Airlift Wing and its C-141 Starlifters — the aircraft that carried American troops and American war dead across the Pacific for three decades. Norton closed in March 1994 under base realignment, and the runway, hangars and vast concrete aprons were handed to a civilian authority. The 10,000-foot runway stayed. So did the scale, which is the thing no soundstage can fake: taxiways wide enough to turn a transport, and open ground running flat toward the San Bernardino Mountains.

The airport is public. There is a terminal at 294 South Leland Norton Way, the road itself named for a Medal of Honor pilot from San Bernardino killed in Vietnam, and the perimeter roads give long, clear views across the field.

Stand at the fence line in the afternoon when the mountains go pink and the heat comes off the concrete in sheets. A departure from here never looked like a departure from a city. It looked like leaving the country, and that is precisely what the film needed. Photo: representative military transport aircraft on a tarmac.