A Walk to Remember

When it comes to the mental health of veterans, Chad Lennon doesn’t just talk the talk, he walks the walk—even when that walk is across most of Suffolk County.

In September 2025, wearing combat boots and carrying a full-sized Suicide Awareness & Remembrance flag, Lennon spent 25 hours walking from the fire department in Orient to the Armed Forces Plaza in Hauppauge—a total of 66 miles. The walk highlighted the fact that 18 veterans commit suicide every day, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“Sometimes the strongest of us are the ones struggling the most,” Lennon says. Going to war, he adds, “is such a unique experience. There’s nothing normal about going into a combat zone and thinking ‘Someone wants to kill me’ 24/7 while you’re there.”

Lennon, it should be added, also talks the talk, both as legislator of the 6th District in Suffolk County—a position he’s held since January 2024—and as an attorney with Tully Rinckey in Manhattan, where he handles veterans disability claims, discharge upgrades, and security clearance and federal employment matters.

“There are some attorneys where it’s just ‘If I’m not making money, I’m not doing it,’” says fellow veterans law attorney Janet Santeramo. “Chad is not like that at all. He does what he believes to be right in dealing with members of the community. He gets a lot of community support for veterans.”

A former Marine, current USMC Reserve lieutenant colonel, and a Purple Heart recipient, Lennon grew up on Long Island, where he followed his father into construction work after high school. “I remember senior prom, in the limo. We drove by and I go, ‘Hey, that’s the construction site I’ll be at tomorrow,’” he says. He wound up working on such high-profile projects as the cleanup of the World Trade Center site and the reconstruction of JFK Airport.

Though he had his eye on the military, his father insisted he go to college first. So he earned a B.A. in sociology at Wagner College in 2003, followed by a master’s in secondary education and teaching three years later from Adelphi University. In 2008, he joined the Marines.

As a platoon commander in Afghanistan, he led more than 50 combat missions, including one where his MRAP transport vehicle hit an IED. Almost everyone aboard suffered concussions. The driver’s foot was broken, and pieces of metal tore into Lennon’s elbow, but his seat stopped a chunk that was headed for his back. The repair crew gave it to him as a souvenir. “Two of the Marines had to be medevaced out the next day,” he remembers. “The vehicle was destroyed. I wasn’t allowed back out for another week because of the concussion.” 

After he left active duty in 2012, a magazine article in The Economist sparked the idea of law school. “The president, the vice president, all these folks in the House and the Senate have law degrees,” he remembers thinking. “And I’m like, ‘You know what? All these people are making these decisions that are affecting my life. Maybe I should start looking at doing law school to understand the reasoning.’” 

At Touro Law Center, he took part in the Veterans and Servicemembers Rights Clinic, providing free legal assistance to current and former members of the military. When he graduated, he got a job in criminal defense at Murnane & O’Neill in Maryland before returning to Long Island as a prosecutor in the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office. Suffolk County has the highest number of veterans of any New York county, and Lennon soon found a niche working DUI cases in Veterans Court, which emphasizes treatment and rehabilitation over punishment.

In 2019, he went back to Touro as director of the veterans clinic. Two years later, he joined Tully Rinckey.

Since becoming a legislator, Lennon has chaired the county’s Veterans Committee, pushed to reopen the county’s veterans traffic court, and spearheaded the effort to fly the Veteran Suicide Awareness & Remembrance flag at the county’s administrative headquarters—the flag he carried across the county. 

He’s also raised money and awareness about veteran suicide by doing 2,222 pull-ups in 22 hours and dragging a 400-pound chain one mile.

“Lesser people could not balance a schedule like that man has,” says Santeramo.

Even the tattoo on Lennon’s ankle, a semicolon, reflects his concerns. “When your life is over, there’s a period at the end,” Lennon says. “When somebody is a survivor of suicide or has suicidal ideations, it is not the end. It is a semicolon. It’s continuing your story.”