Marine Declares Total War on Red Army
In a sequestered business park at the north end of Lake Forest, the talk is of merciless conquest. Of the implacable foe. Of a five-year campaign.
Even as sunshine brightens the Southern California spring, the talk inside is of annihilation.
Doing the talking is Richard Bowen, a 45-year-old former Marine lieutenant colonel who faces his biggest challenge since retiring from the military two years ago: destroy Orange County’s red imported fire ant population.
He brings to the job a certain amount of good cheer. But make no mistake; this is no picnic.
“Our mission, I call it ‘the E word,’ ” Bowen says. “Eradication. No municipality has ever eradicated the red imported fire ant. There’s lots of folks out there who don’t think we can do it. So I take this as a very serious challenge.”
Bowen’s last military assignment was as officer-in-charge at the Tustin Marine Corps Air Facility. That capped a 22-year career that didn’t take him into combat but gave him a series of jobs which the outside world would call “management.”
In the Marines, they call it “leadership.”
That’s how Bowen sold himself to the Vector Control District board that hired him under a contract with the Board of Supervisors. Bowen hopes he does so well he doesn’t have a job in five years.
“I told them they needed to hire me because the fire ants were organized kind of like an army,” he says. “What more logical person to hire than a former Marine?”
With his team still assembling, Bowen says he hasn’t been out in the field yet. That irritates him, because he wants to find out what his people are up against and to meet with civilians threatened by the ants.
Each ant colony can have 300,000 ants, Bowen says, but his task can be streamlined: Kill the queen in each mound.
That’s done with special bait that sterilizes the queens so they can’t reproduce. As the other ants in each colony die off, one by one, there are no ants left to go get food for the queen. So she dies too.
The problem: Orange County has hundreds of thousands of backyards where the ants might show up. Part of Bowen’s team’s job will be to enlist the public to help spot the ants and notify the Fire Ant Authority.
“We joke about it around here--it’s like the ants are smart,” Bowen says. “They all sting at once. You can have 100 fire ants on your leg and you won’t feel it. Then they somehow communicate . . . and they all sting at once. Then your leg is on fire.”
The venom in the ants’ sting can be fatal to some pets and to a small percentage of humans, Bowen says. The sting causes burning and itching and a small blister that needs to be treated to prevent infection.
Bowen has dived into the task with gusto. After his Marine career, he took a few months off and then hopped in and out of a a few unrelated jobs. He left one investment brokerage job after his twentysomething boss laughed when Bowen casually asked if a veteran got Veterans Day off.
“I quit on Veterans Day,” he says, telling the story in a way that makes me burst out laughing. “I went to a Claim Jumper about 11, had a shot of Jack D and toasted a friend of mine buried in Arlington National. And I never went back to work.”
He concedes he was “wandering around a little bit” until he saw the kill-the-ants job posted on the Internet. He liked the idea of public service and, of course, the chance to lead people again.
He’s hip to the gag potential of characterizing his assignment as war. So, yeah, he says, when he talks of war, some of it is tongue in cheek. “But it is war,” he says a moment later. “That’s kind of how I’m treating it. We’re still talking about eradication, and that means, locate, close with and destroy the enemy.”
Taking the Hill With ‘E Word’ in Mind
Bowen’s platoon will include five area coordinators, an operations manager and another dozen or so foot soldiers. Not to mention $5.9 million from the county to cover at least the next 18 months. “I’ve got the team, I’ve got the experts out there, I just need to marshal my forces,” he says.
Ants, consider yourselves warned.
“The challenge,” Bowen says, “is that the buck stops at this desk. If the E-word fails, there’s nobody to blame but the guy in the mirror. I kind of like that.”
I wish him well and pity the poor ant who gets in his way.
“It’s a beautiful day,” Bowen says as I leave.
“A beautiful day to kill ants.”
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.
