Content and contemplative

With three children and five grandchildren, Mr Kleinig is happy to devote much of his time to supporting his loving family.

“All the years I’ve missed because of army life, I’ve just caught up with,” Mr Kleinig said.

Now 84, Mr Kleinig has immersed himself in a variety of passion projects. This has included installing a commemorative statue at the Officer Cadet School in Portsea and researching the incredible experiences of his father-in-law, Joseph Lidster, who served in World War II and was active in clearing the battlefields of war dead in the Middle East.

Military connections have always been significant for Mr Kleinig. Growing up in Kingaroy, Queensland, the pull of service loomed large from an early age.

“As a young child, I could remember the big convoys going through my hometown of Kingaroy on the way north,” he said.

“This of course, was during the Second World War and just outside Kingaroy there was an air force base with Beaufighters, Mosquitoes, lots of service people in the air force.

“Eventually when we left Kingaroy and went to Lismore … I joined the Lismore High School cadets unit and I found by joining that, even though it was just touching the surface, I became orientated to army life.”

From this point, there was very little doubt Mr Kleinig would pursue a career in the army. However, he did flirt briefly with a career at the local ANZ bank.

“I was interviewed and I got accepted into the bank. I was there for three months and I ended up resigning, much to my mum and dad's disgust, but I did say that I had thrown my hat in to go across to the Officer Cadet School in Portsea,” he said.

“Mother wasn't happy — I had thrown up a job not knowing whether I'd got another job. Luckily, I was accepted into Portsea, and I ended up in the July intake of 1956 training to be an officer.”

Immediately, Mr Kleinig felt he had found another family in the army and describes his 23 years of regular service as “a vocation, not a job”.

“It was seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and when you worked, you worked, when you had time off, I suppose you played,” he said.

“It was also a brotherhood. It was one big group together and as a result of that, there's no two doubts about it, that it was a service family.

“Basically it was a way of life. When one ended up getting married, it became a sisterhood of the wives. And we still have great friendships from army days. Probably more so than any of the other professions that I served in along the way.”

Four years after graduating from officer school, in 1961 Mr Kleinig was posted to Malaysia for two years. In a period of military involvement that has largely slipped from the memory of younger generations, Mr Kleinig had his first experience of conflict as he completed operations on the Malay/Thai border.

“As a professional soldier, it was exciting,” he said.

“It was an accompanied posting and I took my new bride with me.

“We moved into barracks in Camp Terendak, just outside of Malacca. There were married quarters, there were clubs … and it was a lovely life, very colonial. One can sit back and drink your gin and tonics and look at the palm trees swaying.

“We then went to five-and-a-half months on border operations, which was the first serious involvement I had in an operational situation. My battalion luckily had a few enemy contacts but not that many, as there were very few insurgents left.”

The depth of sadness he has for the comrades he lost in Vietnam stands in stark contrast to the more sedate time in Malaysia.

Fifty-five years after being deployed to South Vietnam in 1967, Mr Kleinig is still challenged by the nature of the mission.

“I suppose it's always a big question, ‘was the Vietnam War necessary?’ And after I've thought about it a long time, I continue to say to myself, ‘yes, it was’,” he said.

“We were fighting basically for a cause, for the people of South Vietnam, most of which I still firmly believe were not happy with communism. And unfortunately, I think South Vietnam was also corrupt at the highest levels. So, it's a bit of a mixed feeling, but in my time, and when we went, I think our troops were doing the country a world of good.

“It was just a simple matter of doing our job as we were trained and doing it as well as we could.

“Talking about the losses, it's always sad to lose troops. In fact, it absolutely shatters you, the first death on active service. It could have been you, it could have been the man standing next to you. You know that this particular person had a mother and father, probably a wife, brothers and sisters.

“And, I suppose at the end of our tour, when we had lost 26-odd soldiers, again you say, ‘was it worth it?’ And it’ll be a question that I'll probably keep thinking about for the rest of my life.”

After serving in Vietnam, Mr Kleinig spent a brief period at Puckapunyal, which he thoroughly enjoyed.

In a final overseas posting, Mr Kleinig was appointed the senior Australian observer for the United Nations’ Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan in the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Driven by a desire for a more settled family life, Mr Kleinig resigned his commission as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1977 to take on the position of controller of the Telecom (now Telstra) Tower in Canberra.

Mr Kleinig was responsible for the management of the tower’s administrative plan and its daily management. It was a position that carried some lighter and more novel moments that Mr Kleinig looks back on fondly, including hosting former NASA astronauts John Young — who completed a moon landing — Bob Crippen and Dr Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

Mr Kleinig then worked as the national executive director of the Alcohol and Drug Foundation and as the head of the Canberra Association for Regional Development.

These days, Mr Kleinig is content with a quieter routine in Nagambie.

“Nagambie is growing, (but) it is still small enough, quiet enough,” he said.

“We can get all of our essentials that we need here. Although we do a few trips to Seymour for shopping and, when necessary, Shepparton is not too far,” he said.

“We’ve got the eldest grandson, who has established his own house just around the corner. I’ve got my son and daughter-in-law in the other direction, so we’re very family orientated.”

Mr Kleinig hopes his grandchildren and future generations will continue to celebrate family values.

“I would like to see them grow up as good, solid Christians,” he said.

“I would like to see them work together with great national objectives. I'd like to see them be able to discern between what is right and what is wrong.

“And I think at the end of it, I'd just like to see them end up happy within a family setting, working as a family.

“I'm a great believer in the strength of a nation starts off with the family, then it goes to the community, and then it goes to the state, then it goes to the nation.”

By his side for more than 62 years has been Mr Kleinig’s wife, Deidre. When asked about her role in his journey, the Nagambie veteran takes a deep breath, his eyes starting to well as the gratitude spills over, and he offers two final words to describe his partner in life — “a rock”.