Exclusive | NJ Army vet with one lung to climb Indonesias tallest mountain after already tackling Kilimanjaro

It’s peak resilience.A New Jersey Army veteran with one lung is defying all odds by climbing Indonesia’s tallest mountain and two other peaks next week — after a grueling ascent to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro last year.Adam Faatz, 37, will summit the 16,024-foot Carstensz Pyramid on April 22, despite having his left lung removed due to pulmonary fibrosis.“Mountaineering, for me, and the outdoors is probably what saved my life,” Faatz, of Hawthorne, NJ — who had an uphill mental health battle after his diagnosis — told The Post recently.“It’s good for my wellbeing.It’s my outlet.

I want to try to encourage people to go and try challenges like this — not to let their disabilities or illnesses limit them.” He plans to first climb the Island nation’s 9,944-foot Mount Agung on April 18 followed by Mount Rinjani, the 12,224-foot volcano, the next day during his 10-day journey.Faatz, who joined the Army as an 18-year-old in 2006, suffered lung scarring after inhaling toxic fumes from a “burn pit” while serving in Iraq.During his 2009 deployment, he was tasked with finding and demolishing roadside bombs, and ended up frequently inhaling toxic fumes from the smoke-spewing pit, he said.“They call them nowadays the modern-day agent orange because anything and everything basically that the military would use gets destroyed in that burn pit,” he said.“You have chemicals, you have bodily fluids, rubber, paint,” he said.After years of pain and misdiagnoses, a New York doctor discovered that his left lung was covered in scar tissue in November 2018.“They ended up almost removing the entire left lung,” he said.

“It wasn’t working.”In 2021, he turned to the outdoors along with therapy for help recovering from “a real decline mental health-wise,” he said.“I was really lonely battling what was going on with [my] lungs and all this medical stuff,” he said.“I had known for a long time I kinda needed help.”After being h...