Army Accuses 6 of Deserting Special Unit

The Army charged six soldiers who left their military intelligence unit in West Germany with desertion and declined to comment on a report Thursday that the six had gone to Florida on a bizarre mission to “destroy the Antichrist.”

The Army was continuing its counterintelligence investigation of the six, who were being held at Ft. Benning, Ga., but no evidence of espionage or U.S. security compromises was found in the early stages.

“They have all been charged with desertion,” Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said.

The soldiers, arrested last Friday and Saturday in Gulf Breeze, Fla., told fellow soldiers before leaving West Germany that they were going to find and “destroy the Antichrist,” who was believed to be in the Pensacola, Fla., area, the military newspaper Stars and Stripes reported Thursday.

The European edition of the paper, citing Army sources, said the soldiers destroyed or gave away their personal belongings before leaving their 701st Military Intelligence Brigade in Augsburg, West Germany, about July 9.

In another report, published Wednesday, a man who sold the soldiers a van said they told him that they were Christian fundamentalists who “believed the Rapture was going to happen in Pensacola Beach in October.”

William Grant of Morristown, Tenn., told the Pensacola News Journal: “I don’t want to talk down to anyone about anyone else’s religious beliefs, but they said if they weren’t on the beach in Pensacola, they wouldn’t go to heaven.”

Maj. Joe Padilla, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon, Wednesday retracted an earlier statement that the six were members of a group known as “The End of the World.” He said the term was found in doodles in the room of one of the soldiers but that “there is no group as far as we can tell.”

The soldiers--five men and a woman--were trained as cryptographers, whose job was to intercept and decipher enemy communications in wartime.

They were identified as Sgt. Annette P. Eccleston, 22, hometown unavailable; Spec. Kenneth G. Beason, 26, Jefferson City, Tenn.; Spec. Vance A. Davis, 25, Valley Center, Kan.; Pvt. Michael Hueckstaedt, 19, Farson, Wyo.; Pvt. Kris P. Perlock, 20, Osceola, Wis.; and Pvt. William N. Setterberg, 20, Pittsburgh, Pa.