Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego -- Pvt. Damon K. Meeks, Platoon 3250, Lima Company, 3rd Recruit Training Battalion, fought and overcame the challenges of growing up in a troubled neighborhood and chose to become part of a different brotherhood.
Meeks was born and raised in the west side of Chicago. The house where he lived in, with his three brothers and four sisters, was located across the street from the Chicago Housing Projects. When he was still young, the city closed down those projects forcing the tenants to move into Meek’s neighborhood. As he recalled, they also brought trouble with them.
“Most of the people from the housing project were gang members or those who lived that type of lifestyle,” said 18-year-old Meeks. “Though we technically were in the projects as well, it wasn’t as bad as what they were in. It really changed the neighborhood and how we went about our regular lives.”
Every day for Meeks became a literal fight to go about his daily business, including going to school.
“Where I lived, the projects I was in, was run by one gang,” said Meeks, who was recruited out of Recruiting Substation Oak Park, Ill. “The school I went to was down the street but was in the rival gang territory. The rival gang kids would fight with me every single day, and kids from my area would fight with them.”
His mother was aware of what their neighborhood became and did her best to shield him from that lifestyle. She was strict with him and did not let him go outside for fear of being attacked or talked into joining a gang. His father, however, had a different view on the situation.
“My dad lived the life of a gang member,” said Meeks. “He wanted me to go outside and be like him. I didn’t want to be like him. I wanted to listen to my mom, but at the same time didn’t want to be in the house all day.”
Luckily for Meeks, his cousins provided an opportunity to live like a kid.
“My cousins would invite me over to get me out of the area and just hang with them,” said Meeks. “They lived in a suburban area so ‘going outside’ was a whole lot different and we could just be regular kids having fun.”
Meeks had little interest in the gangs, their activities or lifestyle. Unfortunately, his friends didn’t have the same viewpoint and ended up joining.
“Around the age of 12 or 13, my friends started to join the local gang,” said Meeks. “I considered them my friends and everything, but they wanted me to do stuff with them, which most of the time was fighting. That was an everyday thing, and I got tired of hearing about it.”
Ready to distance himself even further from the gangs, Meeks decided to put his foot down and stopped talking to his friends who had gone in the opposite direction from him.
“I had dropped by, time to time, just to say hi to them, but as we got older, things got more intense with them,” said Meeks. “It had to stop. Once I got to high school I stopped talking to them. At the same time they started getting more violent, bringing guns with them, and they wanted me to get involved as well. I wanted nothing to do with it.”
Meeks’ strong desire to not join a gang had not come from his simple disinterest in the lifestyle, but what he had seen it done to people close to him, primarily his father.
“Seeing my dad and his life as a gang member, it’s really what made me want to have nothing to do with it,” said Meeks. “He was in and out of jail. He would go in for three years, come out for six months, and then go back in. I just didn’t want to become him.”
Meeks explained that after he stopped talking to people in the gangs, he made sure he stayed distant from them. He went to the library that was in the rival gang area just so he could be sure they wouldn’t be there. He started a job at a grocery store and picked up as many hours as he could to keep himself busy and away from them. He also tried to just hang out with people who were also trying to avoid the gangs, like his brothers or cousins.
“They eventually caught on that it just wasn’t for me,” said Meeks. “I still went to school, had a job and played in sports. After they realized all of this, there weren’t any negative feelings toward me.”
Though Meeks kept himself out of the gangs, he still yearned to be in a brotherhood. One day a television commercial showed him exactly how he could achieve it.
“Going through high school I wanted to be part of something, outside of sports, but the only options with friends was in a gang,” said Meeks. “Through commercials and movies, I learned that the Marine Corps was a good brotherhood; and was about doing the right thing. That’s what I wanted.”
During his sophomore year of high school, Meeks looked into the Marine Corps by going on the internet to watch videos and browsed the Marine Corps website. Shortly after, during his junior year, he went to his local recruiting office and signed up.
Meeks didn’t inform his friends he was going to recruit training until it was time for him to leave. During that time, he tried to influence their decision about their lifestyle.
“Before I left I tried hinting to them that they could do something else with their lives as well; to move on from the gang life,” said Meeks. “I tried doing that with one of my good friends who got caught up in the gangs. I tried showing him there was more to life than the gangs by taking him around to the areas I had been going to and showing him he didn’t have to live that way.”
With his neighborhood behind him, Meeks faced a new hardship in his life, a United States Marine Corps drill instructor.
“It was a hard adjustment,” said Meeks. “I didn’t like the way they were talking to me and had an attitude when I first came here.”
The Marine Corps introduced cores and values that differed greatly from the ones he grew up with.
“The whole concept of integrity, they were teaching us, was hard for me to understand,” said Meeks. “They told us you’re supposed to correct a Marine if they were wrong but, back where I’m from, you’re not supposed to snitch, and that’s how I viewed it in the beginning.”
Meeks’ drill instructors identified this early on and decided to approach it differently with him.
“When I first started talking to him about what was on his mind and what was holding him back, I realized the gravity of his background and where he came from,” said Sgt. Michael D. Clark, senior drill instructor, Plt. 3250. “We saw that incentive training and yelling wasn’t working. I then started guiding him and teaching the reasoning for things to help him understand better.”
Clark’s efforts paid off as Meeks started to understand the concepts being taught.
“After a while it finally just clicked,” said Meeks. “I got it and then had a different viewpoint and attitude on everything.”
His drill instructors also noticed the difference in his performance as a recruit.
“Around the third week of training we started to see a transformation in him,” said Clark, a Las Vegas, native. “During the second phase of training we really saw his overall basic functions improve. He started to move faster and sound off louder.”
The last challenge he faced was the Crucible, a 54-hour endurance test, during which recruits must conquer more than 30 different obstacles while experiencing food and sleep deprivation. On the last event, the Reaper hike, when at the bottom of the Reaper hill, Meeks had to dig deep to find the motivation to push on.
“I was tired; the (Crucible) was much harder than I thought,” said Meeks. I kept telling myself to keep going. I thought back to the days when I had to fight every day to get where I was going, and used that as motivation to keep going. I’m not going to stop fighting now.”
Meeks accomplished his goal and successfully joined the brotherhood of the United States Marine Corps. His next obstacle will be Marine Combat Training at Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, Calif. He will then attend his military occupational specialty training as a combat engineer. Meeks can now look back and see how his determination and dedication to doing the right thing paid off and let him fulfill his dream.
“I feel great, accomplished,” said Meeks. “This was something that I wanted to do and did it.”