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Local recovery diver shares his stories
Published January 29, 2010
SEGUIN — When diver Dan Misiaszek and the other members of the San Marcos Area Recovery Team came to Guadalupe County over the last two decades, the news was never good.
July 21, 2008, SMART divers, an elite volunteer team made up of police officers, firefighters and paramedics trained in recovery diving and processing underwater death or crime scenes came to Lake Dunlap after Houston-area resident Kyle Ritcheske drowned.
Sept. 4, 2000, SMART was called out when Scotty Ramirez drowned while seeking a low bank to get his four-wheeler out of the San Marcos River.
July 5, 1997, SMART came to Lake McQueeney to look for a 50-year-old woman who was thrown from a boat and drowned in a collision.
Anybody who has seen SMART work knows the scene on the banks of a body recovery effort is usually a heart-rending one with families and friends of the deceased often hoping for a miracle that can never happen.
What fewer people knew was the effect this kind of work had on the divers themselves.
Misiaszek, 48, was a San Marcos police sergeant who was founder and commander of the SMART divers up until 2006, when he retired from the SMPD where his wife, Kathy, still works as a detective to go to Baghdad, Iraq, to train that country’s police officers to take over their duties from the U.S. armed forces.
His autobiography, “Hardened Hearts,” outlines Misiaszek’s career as a soldier, paramedic, firefighter, police officer, recovery diver, military contractor and, ultimately, as the survivor of a number of harrowing episodes — many of which included his wife, who played key roles, such as in a deep dive into a Wimberley cave in which they and another diver nearly lost their own lives recovering human remains.
The title of the 200-page paperback comes from Misiaszek’s favorite Biblical passage, Hebrews 3:15, which includes the words, “Today if you hear His voice, harden not your hearts... .”
The book deals with not just the incidents that make up a public safety or law enforcement career, but also with the effects of such work on the people who do it.
It includes harrowing stories of SMART dives in the Wimberley and Canyon Lake area, as well as others in Mexico and elsewhere covered in local news media with never-before-released details about what happened or the dangers involved.
“We didn’t let on then, because at the time we didn’t want people to know,” Misiaszek said. “What I want people to know now, if they’re thinking about going into these fields, is what can happen to them. There’s a physical danger, and there’s an emotional danger. You can wear your helmet and your body armor to protect your body, but you need something to help protect your heart, because in any one of these fields, you’ll have emotional ups and downs.”
Misiaszek, who had an interest in photojournalism growing up in upstate New York, instead ended up serving his country and then its citizens. He began writing about the life of a paramedic under the working title “Code 3” back in his days in the U.S. Army airborne, but put it away for decades.
Over the years, Misiaszek shared some of his stories, and heard more than once that he should write a book.
“I told some of those stories, and people wouldn’t believe them,” he said.
But he didn’t do anything with the paramedic stories again until he was billeted in Baghdad — and had a lot of free time, when he wasn’t out running protection or extraction operations — and a mounted machine gun — for a well-known American military contractor then called Blackwater Worldwide.
“It sat for years, and I didn’t revisit it until about 2007 in Baghdad. When you had down time in Baghdad, you were basically in a prison cell,” Misiaszek said. “You couldn’t leave the base if you weren’t on a mission. So I put it all down on paper, and started editing it. It was basically something to occupy my time.”
He decided to publish it, he said, when he showed it to someone else who thought it was fantastic.
Misiaszek came home from Baghdad late last year, and “Hardened Hearts” went on sale on amazon.com and other Internet booksellers recently. In addition, it can be bought directly off Misiaszek’s own Web site, http://fp1.centurytel.net/diverdan .
Now home for a few months, Misiaszek contemplates going overseas again — perhaps as a contract firearms instructor in Afghanistan or maybe working in logistics in Kuwait.
But right now, he’s not in a hurry to go back.
He’s also working on another book.
This one is a police novel based on stories Misiaszek has lived, seen or heard about during his law enforcement career.
It’s a murder mystery that starts out with a reverse sting operation at the Tower of the Americas where local police officers investigating call girl murders arrest a prostitute — only to discover she’s a beautiful FBI agent who, unbeknownst to the locals, was working the same investigation.
“It’s a police story, and many of the events are true, but they didn’t occur just as said to the people said,” Misiaszek said. “When you’re writing non-fiction, you have to go with just what happened. When you’re writing fiction, you can use your imagination a little.”
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