by Pete Earley
Besides money, sex was becoming a problem. “Alice wasn’t warm sexually after we got married,” Jeffrey later complained. “She felt guilty because she had gotten pregnant before we were married. She started getting these migraine headaches. I was very frustrated and I told her that she simply wasn’t satisfying me.” Alice later blamed Jeffrey for their sexual problems. “Jeffrey was fixated on sex. Sex, sex, sex. That was all he thought about, all he wanted to do. He’d do it several times a day if I let him, and when we did it, he just wanted to satisfy himself. He didn’t care about me and my feelings.”
In the spring of 1972, Jeffrey was transferred to the USS Shelton, a battle-tested Korean War destroyer with a crew of 275 men and two twin five-inch guns. On May 30, Jeffrey was told that the ship was going to Vietnam. He wrote his parents and asked if Alice and Damon could live in Independence with them while he was gone. They agreed. On June 13, Jeffrey kissed Alice and Damon goodbye. Twenty-seven days later, the USS Shelton arrived off the coast of Vietnam.
On board the ship, Jeffrey spent all of his free time reading the Book of Mormon. Like the Bible, it was divided into books, rather than chapters, and he studied all fifteen. He still wanted to know the scriptures better than Alice. One verse that Jeffrey read while studying bothered him. Verse 65 in the Second Book of Nephi said: “For the Spirit is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.” Jeffrey was confident that he knew what it meant. God hadn’t changed since the time of Moses. God was God. But if that was true and God hadn’t changed, then why didn’t He still do all of the wonderful things that He had done in biblical days? Specifically, why hadn’t He intervened in Jeffrey’s life? Alice had told him about her experiences at the summer camp and how an evil presence had tried to crush her in her bedroom. Jeffrey had never experienced any supernatural event. He had prayed for some sort of sign, but there was none.
While Jeffrey wrestled with the spiritual, back in Independence, Alice was learning about the secular. Lois was keeping her promise of accepting Alice as a member of the Lundgren family. Like Professor Henry Higgins, she was supervising a transformation. She taught Alice how to style her hair. She got Alice to stop biting her fingernails, and when she did, Lois rewarded her with a manicure. They went shopping together and Lois taught Alice how to select outfits that complimented her figure, how to mix and match blouses and skirts so they didn’t clash. Lois taught Alice about antiques and showed her how to refinish furniture. She instructed her on etiquette, simple things really, such as how to correctly set a table and host a party. In the kitchen, Lois showed Alice how to cook meals that were more exotic than the meat and potatoes that she had grown up eating.
While Lois kept busy with Alice, Don focused on Damon. They became buddies. Each morning, the twenty-two-month-old would fuss unless he got to eat his rice crispy cereal with his “paw-paw.” Jeffrey had told Alice that his father was a cold and harsh taskmaster. But she saw none of that in the way Don treated his grandson. If anything, he spoiled him.
On the clear and sunny Sunday morning of October 15, 1972, Jeffrey’s scripture studies were interrupted by a loud boom. The USS Shelton was under attack. Naval Intelligence had assured the destroyer’s captain that the island of Hon Co, called Tiger Island by U.S. troops, was free of enemy artillery, but the reports had been wrong. The first round fired by enemy artillery dropped short. The second overshot the ship. Obviously, the North Vietnamese were sighting in their weapon for the kill. But when the third round was fired, it dropped short too. And then the firing ended. The ship’s captain described the brief attack in the ship’s log as an “extremely close call.”
Four days later the destroyer was in the Gulf of Tonkin when enemy artillery again began shooting. This time, the battle was much more fierce. For thirty minutes, enemy guns exchanged fire with the USS Shelton and a nearby cruiser, the USS Providence. The two U.S. ships fired more than 120 rounds at the enemy. The North Vietnamese fired just as many back. Yet neither U.S. ship was hit. While the destroyer’s crew joked about the enemy’s poor marksmanship, Jeffrey began developing a different theory.
In mid-December, the destroyer again came under attack. The captain of the USS Shelton would later report that more than 190 shots were fired at his ship. None hit. Two days later, the destroyer was engaged in the biggest battle of its history. More than seven hundred shots were fired at the USS Shelton by a battery of shore guns. As Lundgren and other crewmembers manned their battle stations, rounds peppered the water causing geyser-like eruptions. Despite the repeated firing, not a single round hit the destroyer. “Many splashes within fifty yards were observed,” the captain wrote in the ship’s log, “with one missing the port bow by only twenty feet.” It was, the captain noted, a “miracle” that the USS Shelton escaped the onslaught of enemy rounds.
That was exactly how Jeffrey felt. “The enemy had us. They fired shells over us. They fired shells short. They had us locked on with radar. There was no way they could miss. But they fired and fired and fired and they couldn’t hit us. There was no reason for them to miss except for one reason. God made it impossible for them to hit the ship.”
As the USS Shelton sailed out of the Gulf of Tonkin on December 22 and made its way home, the crew celebrated its good luck. Jeffrey watched with a knowing grin. None of his shipmates realized that the only reason they were alive was because of him, he explained later. He had been the only saint aboard the ship. A scripture popped into his mind. “For the Spirit is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.”
“God had showed me a sign,” Jeffrey said. “He had protected the ship because he didn’t want me to die in Vietnam.”
For the first time in his life, Jeffrey looked upon religion as something useful. He also remembered what Alice had told him about the patriarch’s prediction. Alice’s husband was going to do great things for the church. All the way home, Jeffrey studied his scriptures.
Chapter 5
WHEN the USS Shelton returned to San Diego on January 13, 1973, Jeffrey and the other crewmembers were awarded a slew of military decorations. Jeffrey received three from the navy: the National Defense Service Medal, Vietnam Service Medal with one Bronze Star, and the Combat Action Ribbon. The South Vietnamese government issued him its Republic of Vietnam Campaign Medal and he received a special letter of commendation for the outstanding job that he had done keeping electronic equipment aboard the ship in good working order. His evaluations by his superiors showed Jeffrey was an above-average sailor, skilled at his job and eager to please.
“I had an excellent time aboard that ship and if it weren’t for Alice, I would have made the navy my career,” Jeffrey complained later. “I liked the lifestyle, but the first thing that Alice said when I stepped off the ship and met her was ‘Promise me that you’ll never leave me again.’ Those were her exact first words. She was so insecure.”
Alice hadn’t had time to find an apartment in San Diego before Jeffrey returned from Vietnam. They needed a place to stay while they looked. A friend mentioned that Louise Stone lived in San Diego with her husband, Muril, whom everyone called Sonny. He was a chief petty officer assigned to the United States Marine Corps Recruit Depot just up the bay from the naval station where Jeffrey was stationed. Louise had grown up attending the Slover Park congregation. Her father, Damon Binger, had been the pastor. Because Louise was two years older than Jeffrey, she had been friends with a different crowd at church, but she recognized his voice when he called her.
“I was wondering if we could stay with you for a while?” Jeffrey asked. Even though Louise hadn’t seen him in nine years, she agreed. It was common for saints to open up their homes to other church members in need. Sonny didn’t care either. “Sailors help out sailors,” he remarked.
During the week that Jeffrey, Alice, and Damon spent with Louise and Sonny, the two women became lifelong friends. “There was a chemistry between us,” Louise said later. “I think I know her better than any other person on earth.”
Sonny and Jeffrey got
along too, but they were not close. There was something about Jeffrey that Sonny didn’t like, although he couldn’t pinpoint what it was that made him uneasy. After the Lundgrens found an apartment, they still got together nearly every weekend with the Stones. Once or twice a week, Alice and Louise would chat on the telephone, sometimes for hours.
Two months after the USS Shelton returned to port, the navy decommissioned it and the destroyer was sold to the Taiwan government. Jeffrey was put in charge of planning the farewell party for the crew. He asked Alice to help and she got to show off everything that she had learned from Lois. Jeffrey and Alice didn’t drink alcohol, but there was plenty of liquor at the party and several crewmembers got drunk. At one point, an officer stopped at the table where Jeffrey and Alice were sitting with several couples. Throwing one arm around Alice’s shoulders, the officer broadcast in a slightly slurred, booming voice: “Little lady, I want you to know that your husband was the only man who was faithful to his wife during our cruise.” Alice’s face blushed as she whispered a quick “Thank you.” The other women sitting at the table were not as bashful. “What?” one shrieked. The officer repeated himself: “That’s what I said. Good old Jeffrey was the only man who kept his pants zipped.” Tempers flared as wives demanded explanations and husbands denied their accusations. Jeffrey and Alice slipped out of the room.
“Weren’t you even tempted?” asked Alice.
“You are the only woman in the world that I will ever want,” he replied.
Alice couldn’t wait to tell Louise. Most of the time, Jeffrey was always criticizing Alice, calling her stupid, but sometimes he could say just what she wanted to hear.
“Sonny and I both thought that Jeffrey was tremendously rude to Alice,” Louise said later. “Jeff would make decisions without consulting her or even telling her about them. He had complete control in all decision making, and he just expected Alice to accept that.”
One night Louise got a telephone call from Alice after Jeffrey had gone to sleep. Alice had crept out of the bedroom to call her. She told Louise that Jeffrey had gotten angry because she had asked him how much money was in their checking account.
“I am not allowed to even touch the checkbook or to even know how much is in it,” explained Alice. She was worried because Jeffrey hadn’t been paying all the bills.
“Well, why don’t you just ask him about it?” Louise asked.
“I can’t,” said Alice. “He’ll explode.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Louise replied.
That weekend when the two couples got together, Jeffrey was cold toward Louise. She learned later that he was irritated because he had heard about her conversation with Alice. “He thought I had too much influence over Alice.”
Louise knew that many conservative RLDS members believed that God had created a strict hierarchy in every marriage. Much of this attitude was based on the New Testament writings of Paul in his first letter to Timothy, chapter 2, verses 11 through 15:
Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. For I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding they shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.
What surprised Louise was how readily Alice accepted Jeffrey’s dominance. “Jeffrey says it’s a man’s job to love and obey and to serve his God,” Alice explained to Louise one afternoon. “God is the man’s master. That means the man must submit his will to God. The woman’s job is to love and obey and serve her husband. He is her master.”
Such talk exasperated Louise. “I felt Jeffrey was in the process of making Alice into exactly what he wanted her to be. He wanted to control every part of her life and she gave him that control in return for his love. She tried to be exactly what he wanted—the perfect little housewife. She cleaned, she cooked, she canned, she changed diapers, washed clothes, and took care of Jeffrey, and she did it without complaining because she had total faith that he would take care of her and he would love her.”
Jeffrey’s next assignment was aboard the USS Schofield, a guided- missile frigate, which had a well-deserved reputation for being a lemon. He abhorred the ship and was unhappy. Alice had tired of navy life too and she hated the idea of Jeffrey’s going away on another eight-month cruise. During 1973, Alice began complaining about migraine headaches that were so painful she was hospitalized for treatment. When Jeffrey learned that his ship was scheduled to leave on an extended cruise that fall, Alice became depressed. She was so distraught that Jeffrey suggested that she see a psychiatrist. If Alice could get a doctor to say that her mental anguish was caused by Jeffrey’s going away on cruises, maybe the navy would grant him an early discharge. Alice underwent a psychiatric exam and blamed her problems on Jeffrey’s career, but the navy didn’t buy it. “My commanding officer told me, ‘Lundgren, if we had wanted you to have a wife, we’d have packed one in your seabag.’ There was no way the navy was going to let me go early.”
Sonny Stone was a “lifer,” and when he heard how Jeffrey had tried to use Alice’s migraines as an excuse to get a discharge, he got angry. Other rifts began developing between the Lundgrens and Stones. Louise had decided that Jeffrey was fixated with sex. She and Sonny had bought a house with a swimming pool, and on warm nights, they would often skinny-dip together. “It became a joke. People would say, ‘Hey, wonder if Sonny and Louise are in the pool tonight,”’ Louise said. One morning, Alice and Jeffrey dropped in unannounced and spotted some of Sonny’s clothing tossed beside the pool. Obviously, he and Louise had gone for a romantic swim the night before.
“We all joked about it at first,” Louise recalled, “but Jeffrey just wouldn’t let go of it. Every time we got together after that, he would bug us about having sex in the pool. ‘Hey, did you use the pool last night?’ he’d say. Or ‘Hey, when are you and Sonny going to let us use your pool?’ He put a lot of pressure on Alice to ask us to invite them to babysit our kids when we went out so that he and Alice could have sex in our pool. He just went on and on and on about it until it wasn’t funny at all.”
By the time that October arrived, the couples weren’t meeting regularly although Alice and Louise remained close friends.
On November 23, Jeffrey’s ship left San Diego for Pearl Harbor, the first stop on an eight-month trip that would take it to the Indian Ocean. Alice and Damon returned to Missouri, only this time they moved in with Alice’s parents. She had just learned that she was pregnant again. Jeffrey promised to write every day. Alice said that she would too. She also told Louise that she would call her whenever she could afford it.
As he had done when he went to Vietnam, Jeffrey carried his copy of the Book of Mormon with him on the ship. Kevin Currie worked for Jeffrey in the electronics repair shop and was assigned to a bunk next to his. But Kevin didn’t have much in common with his supervisor. Jeffrey was somber, humorless, a by-the-regulation boss. Although Kevin was only one year younger, the thin New York native didn’t take life seriously. He had a tattoo on his leg that said “Just Passing Through,” and that expressed his philosophy. Whenever his ship dropped anchor, Kevin was one of the first to race to the waterfront whorehouses and bars. Religion meant nothing to him. He had been raised in the Episcopalian Church, but had stopped going as a youngster.
Kevin didn’t like Jeffrey at first. “Jeffrey always gave people the impression that he was looking down on them, that he was somehow better,” Kevin said. But after they had spent a few months at sea, Kevin’s opinion changed and he became intrigued. Jeffrey was always studying his scriptures. He didn’t cuss, shunned coffee, wouldn’t smoke, and he wrote letters to his wife every day, sometimes two or three times each day. Yet Jeffrey didn’t browbeat anyone about the Bible or try to evangelize. If anything, he seemed to like keeping whatever he was reading a secret. It was as if he had made some important discovery that he
wasn’t that eager to share.
It turned out that Jeffrey was just as interested in Kevin. “Jeffrey was curious about my carefree attitude,” Kevin said. “I did whatever I wanted and I think, to a certain degree, Jeffrey was envious.”
Still neither made any effort to get to know the other until the USS Schofield stopped to refuel at the Anzuk Naval Base in Singapore. The crew received eight days of liberty and, by chance, Kevin and Jeffrey found themselves crammed into the same taxicab one morning with four other sailors going into the city. Jeffrey asked if any of the men wanted to go sightseeing with him. They laughed. They were headed to a whorehouse. But Jeffrey made the cultural sites on the island that he was going to see sound so interesting that the men finally agreed to join him. They hired pedal-carts, two-seat carriages powered by a man on a bicycle, to take them on their tour. Kevin and Jeffrey sat together. By nightfall, all of the men except Jeffrey had had enough culture. They stopped at a nightclub. Jeffrey waited outside while the others paid to see two women engage in lesbian sex acts. After the show, all the men but Kevin came outside. When he eventually appeared, he was carrying a cucumber.
“Why do you have that?” Jeffrey asked.
Kevin smirked.
“It’s ah, uh, souvenir,” he announced, as the other sailors guffawed.
Jeffrey later learned that the two women had used the cucumber to have sexual intercourse with each other. Kevin had paid one of the women after the show to have sex with him and then had stolen the cucumber. When they got back to the ship that night, Jeffrey wrote a long letter to Alice describing that day’s events. He mentioned Kevin and talked about how the women had used the cucumber on each other. Jeffrey went into such detail that Alice incorrectly suspected that he too had seen the act.