Well, she did occasionally think about ships. Her father served in the Navy and she grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, a huge Chesapeake Bay military town with one of the largest naval bases in the world. She signed up for the U.S. Marine Corps her senior year of high school as a way to get out of town and see the world. And see it she did—first Japan, then the Philippines, then on board the Coast Guard’s Cutter Eagle, an historic World War II sailing ship built with tall masts and billowing sails. In the late 1980s on the Eagle, she was part of the first active-duty crew to sail into Soviet waters in ten years.  

That part about swabbing the deck? It’s true. One of ten women on a crew of 50, she repaired sails and swabbed the deck like any other seaman. “There was no ‘seaperson’ about it,” she quips. No worries: Parker could fend for herself, setting a push-up record in Coast Guard boot camp—she did 79 of them in two minutes.

After the Eagle, she was stationed in Puerto Rico, where she worked as a Coast Guard helicopter flight mechanic. That meant flying in Dolphin helicopters, answering distress calls and saving people from drowning. One night, she helped pull three men and a dog off a reef in a storm. Another time, her team rappelled down to help rescue a drunk guy on a jet ski. “That’s the great thing about the Coast Guard,” she says. “It didn’t matter who you were—if you were in trouble, we would be there to help you out.” —M.K.