I'm sorry to hear about your friend's son. I knew a few former ceremonial marines who deployed after basically begging to be sent to the regular corp because they couldn't bear to be stateside when their brothers in arms were fighting overseas, especially as all of the USMC guard are infantry men & women. The majority of them get out after their 4 year stint, though some will reenlist only if they are allowed to transition out of the ceremonial & guard corps. The only ones I ever knew who reenlisted for ceremonial duties voluntarily were the band members. Ironically, I had a friend who was deployed in Afghanistan while she was in the army. She got out when she came home then wanted to go back and joined the state department. It was only then that her humvee was hit by an ied when delivering books to a girls school and she also suffered brain injury and loss of crew members, but her limbs are intact. I used to meet a lot of soldiers when I worked in DC as I was very close to the USMC headquarters. Many of them were missing limbs, but what worried me was the ones who were missing the part of their brains that were wired for living in a non military capacity. It's very hard for a lot of veterans to reintegrate into civilian life once they've spent so much time overseas actively engaged. Thankfully there are a lot of veteran run non-profits over here that help these men and women, but many fall through the cracks. The suicide rates for these vets is 1.5 the times the amount of civilians and that's just unconscionable considering what these men and women have sacrificed.