Dragon's Current
The Storm that stayed Inside
What is the book about?
Dragon’s Current opens early in Brad Pietzyk’s military career, with a lightning strike that left him physically shaken but determined to continue the work he had built his life around. For years afterward, he served as a combat engineer and mathematician, moving through deployments, responsibilities, and the quiet pressures that accumulate over time. The memoir follows this path forward, tracing the slow shifts in his inner world long before he understood what they meant.
The onset of schizoaffective disorder came later, without a single clear cause to point to. What followed was a gradual unraveling — paranoia, hallucinations, breaks from reality, and the loss of the identity he had spent fifteen years constructing. Brad writes plainly about the confusion of living inside a mind that no longer behaved the way it once had, and the crises that could have ended differently. There is no neat explanation, only the lived experience of trying to survive something that doesn’t announce itself cleanly.
The heart of the memoir is the rebuilding. Dragon’s Current is about the long, uneven work of learning to live with symptoms that never fully fade, and the effort to create a life that can hold together after the old one collapses. It’s a story about identity, loss, and the quiet persistence required to keep going when the storm doesn’t pass — and about finding a way forward that isn’t a return to who he was, but an honest reckoning with who he is now.
Meet the Author
Major Brad Pietzyk served fifteen years in the U.S. Army as a combat engineer and mathematician before being medically retired. The work had shaped most of his adult life, and losing it forced him into a kind of freefall he hadn’t prepared for.
He turned to writing because it was the only way he could make sense of what was happening to him. Living with schizoaffective disorder meant surviving paranoia, hallucinations, and several crises that could have ended differently. The symptoms never fully go away, and the work of managing them is something he carries into every day.
Dragon’s Current grew out of that effort — an attempt to understand the collapse of a life he had built carefully over years, and the slow, uneven process of rebuilding something that could hold together. Brad now lives on the Oregon coast. He tries to be the person he needed in his darkest moments, even on the days when the ground still shifts under him.