Doing his duty.(The Goodness Of America)

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 ...