Will Reynolds just doesn’t know when to give up.
The U.S. Army veteran didn’t give up after a life-threatening battlefield injury devastated his left arm and left leg, knocking him out of the Iraq war. A remotely detonated improvised explosive device tore apart his left side while he was on a reconnaissance mission in southwest Baghdad on Nov. 7, 2004.
He didn’t quit when that injury required 23 surgeries as doctors worked to save his left leg, fighting his way back to the athletic lifestyle he had grown up with. And once more, after he was involved in a bike-on-car accident in 2013, the “damage to my previously salvaged limb” compelled him to pursue “what my doctors and I fought off for nearly 10 years” — amputating his left leg.
And he didn’t quit when he needed to remake his career after the injury.
Reynolds considered business school while recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. When he retired from the Army in 2007, he enrolled at the Simon School of Business at the University of Rochester as a Consortium fellow. He earned an MBA in 2009 and a masters in public health in 2010.
He was featured in a Fourth of July video highlighting his recovery and his work as a board member with Team Red, White & Blue, which works to connect U.S. military veterans with their communities through physical and social activity. Reynolds is also a cyclist for Team RWB.
“I don’t think I could pin any of my rehab successes on any one person,” Reynolds explains in the video. “It’s always a group effort. That’s where organizations like Team Red White & Blue kind of fill that gap.”
Reynolds works as a senior consultant at Deloitte in Washington specializing in program and operations management as part of the company’s Government Operations Service Line.