Man Says AWOL Soldiers Trying to Go to Heaven

GULF BREEZE, Fla. (AP) _ Six soldiers who left their Army intelligence post in West Germany told a man who sold them a van that they were Christian fundamentalists who believed their road to heaven led through a Florida beach.

″They believed the Rapture was going to happen in Pensacola Beach in October,″ William Grant of Morristown, Tenn., told the Pensacola News Journal in an interview published Wednesday.

Many fundamentalist Christians predicte believers will be swept to heaven seven years before the end of the world in the Rapture.

The five men and a woman, members of the 701st Military Intelligence Brigade at Augsburg, West Germany, were arrested in this Pensacola suburb over the weekend. They are being held at Fort Benning, Ga., pending a counterintelligence investigation.

All six held top-secret security clearances and were intelligence analysts assigned to intercepting, identifying and exploiting foreign communications, Padilla said.

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.″

″There is no group as far as we can tell,″ Padilla said.

The term ″End of the World″ was written on doodles found in the room of one of the soldiers in Germany, Padilla said. He said he didn’t know why they left Germany or anything about their religious beliefs.

Said Grant: ″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.″

He said he sold the them a van July 7 in Morristown, near Jefferson City, the hometown of one of the soldiers, Specialist Kenneth Beason, 26.

Gulf Breeze police stopped the van and its driver, Pfc. Michael Huckstaedt, 19 of Farson, Wyo., because the taillights weren’t working. A computer records checked showed that he and the other five were wanted by military authorities.

Gulf Breeze police identified the others as Pfc. Kris Perlock, 20, of Osceola, Wis.; Pfc. William Setterberg, 20, of Pittsburgh; Specialist Vance Davis, 25, of Valley Center, Kan., and Sgt. Annette Eccleston, 22, whose hometown was unknown.

The Army has yet to file any charges against the six, but Padilla said he doubted they would be going back to their unit in Germany. He said they are accused of being absent without authorization which could lead to formal charges of being absent without leave or desertion.

All six held top-secret security clearances and were intelligence analysts assigned to intercepting, identifying and exploiting foreign communications, Padilla said.