They say what you don’t know can’t hurt you. But that didn’t quite prove true for Monty Reed.

In 1986, Reed was conducting night parachute training as a member of the U.S. Army Rangers. Suddenly one of the other jumpers glided too close, coming underneath Reed and cutting off the flow of air to his chute. The chute collapsed about 100 feet from the ground and Reed plummeted to earth.

After the impact, Reed had trouble breathing, but the worst pain was in his broken ankle. He managed to wrap some tape around it, get to his feet, and grab his gear. Rangers are taught to suck it up and keep going, and that’s what Reed did. He walked eight miles to the helicopter.

The next morning Reed couldn’t move. What he didn’t know when he made that eight-mile walk was that he hadn’t just broken his ankle. He’d also broken his back in five places. Doctors told him that walk to the helicopter was likely the last walk he’d ever make.

Disappointment

Until the accident, Monty Reed had been a little like Rocky Balboa. In the film Rocky, Balboa said his father told him he didn’t have much of a brain, so he’d better develop his body. Reed had heard pretty much the same thing from a school guidance counselor. Because of a learning disability, his grades were low and he was terrible at math and spelling. The counselor told him college was out of the question. So Reed had worked on developing his physicality, becoming a respected member of the Army’s elite Ranger corps.

Reed told NBC television’s Bob Dotson that as he lay in the hospital bed he thought, “The experts told me my brain doesn’t work. And now the experts are telling me my body doesn’t work. What am I supposed to do?”

Since he didn’t have any other options, he started reading, and one of the first books he picked was Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi classic Starship Troopers. In one scene, the book described man-made muscles that enabled people to carry 2,000 pounds. The story sparked Reed’s imagination. What if he could make a lightweight version of that muscle suit to help paralyzed people walk?

Discovery

So the guy who was told he didn’t have enough brain power for college started improvising a robot suit made with carpenter levels connected at the knee by a used compact disc. He learned to program a computer to record the way people normally move, then duplicate the actions with synthetic muscles. He did such a good job with his invention that recent versions of the suit have taken top honors at the International Robo Games.

These days 40 expert volunteers meet in Reed’s workshop twice a week to help perfect his project. The group plans to have a hospital test model ready soon and a home version available by 2015. Reed told NBC’s Dotson his goal is to build a suit that will give quadriplegics a way to play the piano, swim, skate, dance, and even climb mountains.

Sound impossible? Reed believes it will happen. And no wonder. First, the kid who was told not to count on his brain developed an award-winning robot suit. Then, after decades of rehabilitation, the paralyzed Army Ranger who was told he would never walk again regained the use of his legs. He even parachuted out of a plane to celebrate his recovery.

To Monty Reed, nothing seems impossible.