From Kitty Hawk to the Air Force Memorial: How a bike ride became a lifeline for wounded warriors

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Thursday, July 9, 2026

340 miles. Four days. One mission: helping wounded airmen and guardians get back on their feet.

The Memorial to Memorial bike ride traces an 80-year-old organization’s roots back to the birthplace of flight, and now serves as a key fundraiser for the Air Force’s Wounded Airmen and Guardians program.

AFA President Lt. Gen. Burt Field and cancer survivor Lt. Col. Christopher Dorough explain how the ride supports recovery for wounded airmen and guardians.

Every year, the Air Force Cycling Team hosts the Air Force Heritage Memorial to Memorial Bike Ride, the M2M, that starts at the Wright Brothers Memorial in North Carolina and ends at the U.S. Air Force Memorial in Washington, D.C. It’s an amazing event that serves as a key fundraiser for the Wounded Airmen and Guardians program of the Air and Space Forces Association.

I’m Guy Taylor from Threat Status at The Washington Times. And right now, I’m lucky to have retired Lieutenant General Burt Field with me. He’s the president and CEO of the Air and Space Forces Association.

Lieutenant General Field, what does the organization do for the U.S. Air Force?

[FIELD] Here’s what the AFA does. We’ve been around for 80 years. We were born a year before, actually, the United States Air Force. And our charter back at the time was to go out and tell the United States that, hey, there’s a new service in town and they fly a bunch of airplanes and it’s not the Army and it’s not the Navy, but it’s the United States Air Force.

What we’ve expanded to is three things. We promote a dominant Air Force and a dominant Space Force. And we say that’s the foundation of a very strong national defense. The second thing we do is we honor and support airmen, guardians, and their families. That’s active, reserve, guardsmen, civilians. The wounded warriors fall into that category. And then we also support their families. And then finally, we honor and respect and remember our heritage. So for both the Air Force and the Space Force.

[TAYLOR] How does AFA work with the Air Force Wounded Warrior Program, and what does the M2M ride mean for AFA?

[FIELD] Wounded Airmen and Guardian Program is run by the Air Force and the Space Force, and we support it. And how we support it is, you know, normally, because we’re a non-profit, we try to raise money and we contribute to those programs and try to help out our wounded airmen and guardians. Which is personal to me because, you know, I’ve been a commander in combat, and I’ve had wounded airmen and guardian, or wounded airmen for sure, and I’ve lost airmen under my command. It still resonates with me.

So being able to be a part of helping those men and women out is really important, not just to me, but to our whole organization.

One of our members came up with this idea, along with a former chief of staff of the Air Force, to celebrate our Air Force heritage with this annual bike ride. It starts at Kitty Hawk, which is where the first airplane flew in 1903. Symbolically, that first airplane was built by a couple bicycle mechanics from Ohio. They went down there and said, hey, maybe this will work, and that was the birth of flight, and where we trace our Air Force roots all the way back to.

So it’s fitting that a bicycle ride starts at where the bicycle mechanics built the first airplane, and ends at those soaring spires of the Air Force Memorial here in D.C.

[TAYLOR] Joining me here at the final destination of the Memorial to Memorial bike ride is retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Dorough. Lt. Col. Dorough was commissioned into the United States Air Force in 2002 and went on to build a distinguished 23-year career as a mobility pilot. But after years of service in the air, he would encounter a new battle at home.

Tell me about your service.

[DOROUGH] I’m an ROTC guy. I was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force, as you said. Went through Texas A&M, commissioned out there in 2003. Became a pilot pretty soon after that. Flew C-130s for the first half of my career, so cargo and people. Did a lot of time in Iraq, was deployed over there five times.

After that, transitioned to diplomacy. So I trained to be a military attaché. I got to do that. Spent a lot of time in Africa. Actually moved the family over there, in Botswana, for a while. Was a military attache. Flew the C-12. So lots more people, moving all over the continent of Africa. And then was about to retire in fall of 2023 when I came under a pretty difficult diagnosis. And after a few years, medically retired from the Air Force. And now I’m here enjoying life.

[TAYLOR] So you had an amazing Air Force career. And even more amazingly, you’re a cancer survivor. How did the Air Force’s Wounded Warrior program help you? Was it involved in your recovery?

[DOROUGH] Absolutely. I had stage four metastatic colorectal cancer. So it was a pretty hard thing to live through. And it wasn’t treated overnight. It took about three and a half years. It was a three and a half year battle to get through all that. And when you’re in something like that, there’s a lot of unknowns. It really throws you into a difficult place mentally, professionally, and physically as well. And the family was, frankly, in a pretty tough place there, too.

Part of the Air Force Wounded Warrior program, one of the many components, is adaptive sports. So they have a whole array of coaches and resources that help guys, pick them up out of bed and get them into sports, get them physically active, which is super helpful, both physically and mentally.

In the middle of my treatments is when I was introduced to cycling, shooting, archery, swimming. I was never a competitive swimmer, now I can compete in swimming and track as well, and indoor rowing. Didn’t even know it was a sport, now I’m doing it.

So, yeah, so they picked me up, introduced me to these sports. I competed in last year’s Warrior Games, which my family got to see. Really redemptive for them to be able to see me go from, you know, being on my bed in chemo to competing on ESPN, getting to do that.

With the M2M now, it’s a big four-day ride, 340 miles. I’ve never done anything like it, but when the message came out saying, hey, this is an opportunity for our warriors to go do, I was like, sign me up. You know, I trust my coaches, I trust these programs, and, yeah, it’s a really cool opportunity. I’m excited to do it.

[TAYLOR] And we talk about it as a bike ride, but it’s really a multi-day cycling event.

[FIELD] It’s a three-day, 350-mile event.

[TAYLOR] AFA also hosts a major leadership, defense leadership, and industry event every year, the Air Space and Cyber Conference.

This is a major event. It’s slated for September 14-16 this year. What’s the significance of having it?

[FIELD] Industry and the Space Force and the Air Force get together, unfiltered, the senior leadership, and they can talk about requirements, how things are going, how to do things better. And they can do it in a very short, concise timeframe. And that goes across the spectrum of things they’re concerned about.

[TAYLOR] Do the riders actually go to the conference?

[FIELD] A lot of them do. A lot of them do. The ride has been growing year after year. The organizers keep raising the bar on their hopes for how much fundraising they can get from this. And those funds go into supporting the Wounded Airmen and Guardian program.

What we’ll do is we help wounded airmen and guardians with travel, we help them with logistics when they’re traveling to different events, we help their caregivers who might need some help in giving them support as well.

And so we don’t run the program, but we’re kind of around the edges trying to support, make sure everything gets done correctly and where we can help. We have a team that is really good at helping.