I called Dunford at eight forty-five to get his version of what had happened. He said he had been up until one in the morning trying to chase down the “casualty” point just in case Trump changed his mind again when he woke Friday morning. Dunford was not happy, saying Trump had basically called him “feckless” during the Sit Room meeting because he thought Dunford’s target options were “too small,” and then later called off the retaliation entirely because it was too large! Good point. On the casualty issue, Dunford said, well after the Sit Room meeting, Pentagon lawyers asked what the potential Iranian casualties might be. Dunford had said, “We don’t know,” which is what he had said in the Sit Room. The lawyers then searched for a table of organization that might lay out the manning pattern for the kinds of targets we had selected and somehow concluded it would be fifty people per battery. “This is all lawyers,” said Dunford, meaning no one with hands-on combat or command responsibility was involved in this “estimation.”53 As best Dunford knew, as the attack moved toward launch, there was no legal issue. No one had flashed a yellow light. At 7:13 p.m., said Dunford, Trump called to say he had heard there could be one hundred fifty dead Iranians. Dunford said he responded, “No, it’s not one hundred fifty.” First, said Dunford, we were already down to two sites rather than three because one we had identified had already packed up and moved, and we weren’t sure where it was. That meant potential deaths were one hundred at most, even by the lawyers’ estimates. As for the two remaining sites, Dunford said they assessed that it would be fifty people per site “max” and tried to explain to Trump why, in the middle of the night Iran time, the numbers at the site were likely to be far smaller. He couldn’t break through, as Trump said, “I don’t like it. They didn’t kill any of our people. I want to stop it. Not a hundred fifty people