Doing his duty.

On September 5, 2002, Rodger Parker was on the way home after his day's work as a letter carrier in suburban Memphis, Tennessee, when he became stuck in late-afternoon traffic. Glancing in the rearview mirror, he noticed a pickup truck approaching on the shoulder of the road, which ran alongside a lake. The truck suddenly veered into the lake and began to sink. Parker maneuvered his car to the side of the road, ran to the lake, and dove in.

As he approached the sinking truck, he heard a female passenger, Betty Byington, scream, "We're going to drown!" Her husband, Robert, had been driving. Reaching the pickup, Parker saw two other young men on the way to help. After directing them to assist Mr. Byington, he sought to help Mrs. Byington, who was struggling to escape and becoming increasingly hysterical. "I told her to calm down, that I'd get her out," Parker recalled for the October 2003 Postal Record, the monthly magazine of the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC).

Mrs. Byington was unable to unfasten her seatbelt, so Parker slipped through the window, released the restraint, pulled her out, and swam the 60 feet or so back to shore. While striving to catch his own breath, he turned toward the lake and noticed that the pickup was within inches of total submersion, and that the other two rescuers were having trouble freeing Mr. Byington.

Parker again dove into the lake and swam to the truck, where one of the men told him that they were unable to either open the driver's side door or loosen Mr. Byington's seatbelt. Parker recalls that "the cab was almost completely submerged. It was filling up fast. I remember Mr. Byington looking at me like, 'This is it.' I saw the fear in his eyes. But I told him, 'I'm gonna get you out.'"

The sinking truck began dragging Parker under, and water was up to the drowning driver's nose, when the letter carrier at last managed to free Byington, pull him from the truck, and get him safely to shore. "To be honest," Parker recalls, "I don't know to this day how I got him out of there."

Rodger Parker had been a letter carrier for only two years, but earlier spent 12 years in the Navy, where his assignments included extensive survival and water-rescue training. As reported by Postal Record, he "didn't give his name to authorities at the scene and he only told his wife about the incident. The local news that night carried accounts of the unidentified letter carrier When Parker's father--who happens to be the postmaster of Memphis heard the story, he put out the word he wanted to find the employee. The next morning, Parker and his co-workers were called together. 'Does anyone know the hero letter carrier,' the supervisor asked. 'Well,' Parker reluctantly admitted, 'I guess it's me.'"

Parker still insists that he is not a hero and that he was merely "doing what I do every day"--serving others. Such service, he believes, is his "duty as a citizen." "I look out for people on my route, especially the elderly people," he told Postal Record. "I have 40 or 50 customers who are over 75, plus a retirement home. I'm always checking on them. If I find the keys left in the door, or the mail isn't picked up, or something that just isn't right, I'll knock and ask if everything's OK."

During a ceremony in Washington, D.C., on September 17 of last year, Parker was honored as the NALC's National Hero of the Year for 2003.