Own the Lake: What Hurricane Katrina Taught a Field Artillery Soldier About Home
The water in New Orleans came up to his chest. Staff Sergeant Samuel Zoker and the 82nd Airborne went house to house after Hurricane Katrina, marking doors and watching for bodies in the current, and he says what he saw there passed what he saw in combat. Born in Liberia during its civil war, he went on to four combat tours, a doctorate, and the rank of command sergeant major.
FEATURED STORYBEHIND THE RANK
The water in New Orleans came up to his chest. Staff Sergeant Samuel Zoker and the rest of the 82nd Airborne Division moved house to house, checking for anyone left behind, marking doors, watching for bodies in the current. In 2006, he'd ship out for a fifteen-month tour in Iraq, and more combat deployments would follow before his career was done. None of it would match what he found in 2005, inside his own country.
“What I saw in Hurricane Katrina passed what I saw in combat,” he says now.
Combat, he explains, comes with an expectation built into it. You know roughly what you signed up for. Katrina carried no such warning. The neighborhoods hit hardest were the ones already struggling before the storm, mostly Black communities without the money or the means to get out ahead of it. The people who stayed behind were often elderly, with nowhere else to go. Zoker and his unit waded through water thick with debris, past houses where bodies were still inside.
“One of the richest countries on Earth,” he says. “It gives you a different perspective on the little bubble you were in.”
Command Sergeant Major Samuel Zoker. Photo courtesy of Dr. Samuel Zoker.
Staff Sergeant Samuel Zoker in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Photo courtesy of Dr. Samuel Zoker.
"What I saw in Hurricane Katrina passed what I saw in combat."
Zoker was born in Liberia, on the west coast of Africa. He was eleven or twelve when the country's civil war broke out, and it stretched through the rest of his childhood. Survival mode, he calls it. There wasn't room to think about what he wanted to be when he grew up.
His parents had already relocated to the United States, and he eventually joined them. A cousin in the U.S. Marine Corps put the idea of enlisting in his head. He walked into a recruiter's office on his own, without discussing it with his mother first. The recruiter told him the process would take a couple of weeks. Zoker told him he'd go that same day if they'd let him.
He went home and told his mother what he'd decided.
“She said, ‘You got my blessing,’” he says. “She was very, very supportive.”
The Army gave him a job based on the tests he took: 13 Bravo, field artillery. He didn't know much about what that meant beyond what he'd seen in recruiting videos, tanks rolling around, something that looked exciting from a distance. Basic training and AIT put him at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, not the assignment he would have picked first, in his telling, but the place that shaped the rest of his career.
After two years at Fort Sill, he went to airborne school and on to the 82nd Airborne Division. The culture shock was real. He was already a sergeant, but rank didn't carry over automatically. He had to compete for his position against soldiers who outranked him, because in the 82nd, position is earned on merit.
“I was blessed with some good leaders and some good mentors who really wrapped their arms around me,” he says. “But you still have to perform.”
Zoker, center, with fellow paratroopers. Photo courtesy of Dr. Samuel Zoker.
Over the course of his career Zoker deployed to Iraq three times and to Afghanistan once. His first Iraq tour, six months, came before he was married. His only job, he says, was to bring every soldier under him home. He admits now that at the time he didn't fully understand a soldier missing a wife or kids back home. He could relate in theory but not in his gut.
By his later deployments he was married with children of his own, and Afghanistan looked different from the inside. His second son was born while he was overseas, and he watched it happen on Skype.
Zoker on deployment. Photo courtesy of Dr. Samuel Zoker
“It's hard to let go,” he says, “because back home is the mind, the wife, the kids, your mom and dad. It's something that keeps you going. It gives you that motivation.”
He didn't lose anyone from his own platoon, and he's careful to make that distinction, but he lost people he served alongside, commanders he worked with directly. The difference between hearing about a loss from a distance and losing someone you knew well, he says, changes everything.
“If anything happened, I hoped it happened to me, not my guys,” he says. “That's the mindset of a leader. The interest of your men and women is above yours.”
"If anything happened, I hoped it happened to me, not my guys."
After the fifteen-month deployment to Iraq, Zoker was given the chance to teach Army ROTC as an instructor at Creighton University in Omaha. He walked in still wired for combat, still cycling through the rhythm of deploy, train, deploy, and found himself instead at a faculty welcome gathering with about ten new hires. One by one, people introduced themselves. This one had a PhD. That one had a master's. Zoker stood up, said his name, said he was Army, and sat back down sweating.
“I said, if he can have a PhD, an MBA, not just because of the label but because of the process he actually went through, I said I can do it too,” he says. “I think I can do it.”
That conversation set off a stretch of years that would produce an MBA, Master of Organizational Management, a PMP certification, and eventually a doctorate, most of it completed while he was still in uniform, moving between deployments, training rotations, and classwork. Nobody in his immediate family had gone to college before him. His mother had wanted to, he says, but she had children to raise and jobs to work, and the timing never lined up.
Managing school, the Army, and a family sounds impossible on paper. Zoker pushes back on the word balance. He prefers manage. Years of deployments and high-stress training, he says, had already taught him how to compartmentalize under pressure, so slotting classwork between missions wasn't the hardest part of his life, even if it looked that way from the outside.
He came close to walking away from a class only once, not the degree itself, over a dispute with a professor who argued that Greek philosophy was the only tradition that mattered in a course on war history, dismissing what came out of Egypt and the rest of the continent before Greek colonization. Zoker dropped the class.
“That was the only real problem I had,” he says. “I didn't quit, because I was already on the road. I believed higher education was important, so I kept moving forward.”
Ask him whether he was chasing credentials to impress an employer or to prove something to himself, and he doesn't hesitate.
It was the hunger, he says. Growing up in Liberia, access to a university was limited in a way that's hard to explain to someone who grew up with community colleges and student loans down the street. He wanted the degrees, yes, but more than that he wanted the tools that came with them: the ability to think critically, to write, to speak in rooms where officers with commissions usually did the talking.
“It was something I had to prove to myself that I could do it,” he says. “But also make my mother proud.”
Zoker climbed the enlisted ranks from E1 to E9, eventually serving as a battalion and brigade command sergeant major before he retired from the Army in 2021. Twenty-three years of moving from deployment to training to deployment came with a personal structure he still keeps, up early, bed made. He's clear that he left the rigidity at the door of his house.
“I left it out of my family domain,” he says. “You have to separate how you operate at work and how you operate at home.”
Zoker at a change of responsibility ceremony. Photo courtesy of Dr. Samuel Zoker.
After retiring, Zoker went to work as a Senior Consultant and at the Department of Veterans Affairs, starting as a benefits advisor and employment coordinator before moving into a government contracting role. He describes an agency most veterans misjudge before they ever walk through the door.
“A lot of veterans have a completely different outlook of the VA,” he says. “Some folks believe the VA is just going to screw them. But once you fully understand the process, you have a whole different notion.”
He points to the VA's three main branches, the Veterans Benefits Administration, the Veterans Health Administration, and the National Cemetery Administration, and to years of paperwork backlogs that once made the benefits side hard for veterans to work through, letters that arrived in the mail written in language that had to be decoded page by page. Some of that has changed, he says, since the VA took steps to speed up the claims process.
The job asked something else of him too, something closer to counseling than paperwork.
“You are a human being like everybody. You want to show empathy,” he says. He isn't a psychiatrist and doesn't pretend to be one, but the first question a veteran usually asks him is whether he served too. Once they know he did, the conversation changes.
“Veterans love to talk to veterans,” he says. “No matter how stressful he or she is, talking to another veteran makes things easier, for them and for you.”
Zoker during his time at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Photo courtesy of Dr. Samuel Zoker.
He left the VA in 2025.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, Zoker started the Open Discussion Podcast, built around a simple idea: inviting service members and everyday people to talk through their experiences without a script.
“I do believe that amplifying veterans' and mental health responders' stories, what they've done and what they continue to do, is an amazing thing to do,” he says. When someone first asked him to sit for a longer interview like this one, his instinct was to ask why him. Then he remembered the stories.
Zoker traces his own approach to mentorship back to a sergeant major he calls Tran, who used to invite him over on weekends when Zoker was a young E6 staff sergeant who would rather have been out with friends. Tran assigned him homework, books to read, ideas to sit with. He wasn't loud. He didn't yell.
“He was just the guy who was calm, collected, balanced,” Zoker says. “But he thought big picture. Strategically. Not just at the organizational level.”
Tran also did something Zoker had rarely seen from a senior noncommissioned officer: he showed up in the motor pool and worked alongside the junior soldiers, made himself reachable. Zoker picked up on the value of that kind of access before he had a name for it.
“That's where I started learning change management without even knowing it,” he says. “If the people affected by a change are involved in the process, it lands different. He provided access.”
The one thing Tran never explicitly taught him, Zoker says, was patience, because the environment they operated in didn't leave room for it. Combat and training moved fast, and Zoker carried that same urgency into his own early leadership, wanting things to happen now, yesterday. He's since learned to check it, at least at work. Slowing down became necessary once he moved into academic and administrative settings where the old pace no longer applied.
He describes his own philosophy on mentoring in a phrase that stops the conversation.
“I don't want to teach you how to fish,” he says. “I want you to own the lake.”
The logic is generational. Teach someone to fish and they need permission to use someone else's water. Give them the lake, and the resource, and the responsibility that comes with it, belongs to them for good, and to whoever they choose to pass it to next.
"I don't want to teach you how to fish. I want you to own the lake."
He's candid about the parts of veteran mental health he still doesn't fully understand. Asked about veteran suicide, he doesn't offer a tidy answer.
“I don't understand suicide,” he says. “Do you? No. Not at all. And I think none of us will, really. You can talk to someone, everything's good, and the next minute it's not.”
What he does believe in is staying in contact, a phone call here and there, a text message here and there, because transition out of the military is difficult, in his words, and people who seem fine can be further from fine than they let on.
He talks about his own transition with the same clarity he brings to everyone else's. He was already married with children by the time he left the Army, which meant he already had people to be honest with. “I already knew some things I could tap into,” he says, “and I had an ecosystem around me, people I could talk to.” Not everyone leaving the military has that built in, which is part of why he keeps building it for other people, one conversation, one podcast episode, one mentee at a time.
Own the lake, he says again, like it's worth repeating. Not because the fish matter. Because the water is his to keep.
Resources
Open Discussion Podcast | https://www.youtube.com/@OPENDISCUSSIONPODCAST-k4j
Samuel Zoker's YouTube channel, where he interviews veterans and everyday people about their lived experiences.
Veterans Crisis Line | 988, then Press 1 | https://www.veteranscrisisline.net/
Free, confidential, 24/7 support for veterans and service members in crisis, also reachable by text at 838255.
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' central hub for applying for and managing benefits and health care.
Veterans Benefits Administration | https://www.benefits.va.gov/benefits/
The VA branch responsible for disability compensation, education, and the benefit claims Zoker spent years helping veterans work through.
82nd Airborne Division | https://www.army.mil/82ndAirborne
The active-duty Army division Zoker served with, including during the 2005 Hurricane Katrina relief effort.
Creighton University | https://www.creighton.edu/
The Omaha university where Zoker taught Army ROTC and first decided to pursue his own degrees.
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