With the current conflict in the Middle East, the release of “Kilroy Was There: A GI’s War in Photographs” might be timely.

The book, published by the Kent State University Press, features pictures taken by Canton native Frank Kessler and text by Tony Hillerman. Both served in World War II.

The book’s title, “Kilroy Was There,” might be confusing to younger generations.

According to the Web site www.kilroywashere.com, the saying stemmed from a cartoon of a head peeking over a wall with “Kilroy was here” scribbled underneath. The cartoon was seen and the term was heard throughout WWII. The Web site said the saying represented the “super GI” — the person who always got there first and was always there when they left.

If this was the case, then the book may have been called “Kessler was here” for his ubiquitous photographs of both the horrors of war and the day-to-day life of soldiers and civilians abroad.

“When I saw Frank Kessler’s photographs I was struck by how different they were from the movie-camera views I see on television,” wrote Hillerman. “These were up-close snapshots of the dirty, damp, and disheveled men in the rifle companies and tank units. It was the war as they endured it.”

Photos of soldiers doing the mundane, such as washing their hands in a street faucet or a group sitting around and peeling vegetables, allows readers a peek into more than the atrocities of war. It allows them to see the soldiers’ humanity and their daily lives abroad.

According to the book, Kessler was an accountant in Canton when he was drafted and assigned to an Army Signal Corps unit. He photographed the war in Europe and, after returning to his wife and family, stored the hundreds of photos in his attic.

Kessler’s brother Lee found the pictures after Frank’s death in 1990 and made them available to the public.

Writer Tony Hillerman appreciated the reality of Kessler’s photographs as he was a celebrated combat veteran, receiving a Purple Heart among other medals and awards.

“With his camera Kessler was out there on the killing fields alongside the rest of us,” Hillerman wrote in the book’s preface. “Kessler had a remarkable talent for making significant the ordinary images of war. With a snapshot of a U.S. Army medic lighting a cigarette for a bloody German soldier, he tells us how opposing troops came to see one another. Like no other photographs I’ve seen, Kessler’s capture the ugliness, wreckage, cold, and misery of war.”

Hillerman was a journalist and professor as well as a soldier and has published both fiction and nonfiction books.

The book is available in hardcover.

E-mail: sjagtian@kent.edu