In their words: David Markel

Can you explain to us what you remember from the day?

I think my first period I had class with Dr. King, and I think it was immediately after first period — I had a free period and at that point, I was walking through by where the yearbook office was, I don’t remember where that is, I think in the Math-Science building in the basement, maybe, and I just happened to be walking past there and people were gathered around a TV. . . . I didn’t really understand what was going on at first so I was just watching, seeing that the World Trade Center is on fire, and obviously you understand that a plane has hit it but, you know, while we were watching it on TV people had no idea what had happened. Once the second plane hit everyone kind of suspected that it was a terrorist attack or maybe not even a terrorist attack — we’re so conditioned now to thinking that everything was a terrorist attack. I think back then people thought this was, you know, an act of war, which in some senses it was, but we didn’t know who was responsible, we didn’t know what their reasons were, and certainly nobody had ever really used airplanes as weapons in that way before, at least not passenger airplanes. So I think everybody was just really confused and at some point.

I think I went on to my third-period class and then maybe third period or fourth period, the entire school went into an assembly. They basically said, you know, “There is something going on, the Twin Towers have been hit.” I think at that point the Pentagon might have been hit as well. “Call your parents, if you have cars get out of here. We’re closing the school because we don’t really know what’s going on.” I remember talking to some of the other teachers and just kind of waiting around. I actually remember I was talking to Mr. Ferguson — I was a senior at the time and he was one of the football coaches — and so we were talking about, you know, are we going to have football practice, things like that. The rationale, it’s kind of crazy to think about it now, but people honestly thought that [our area] could have been the next target. It’s a very self-centered way to look at things, I guess, looking back on it. It just shows how confused everybody was about what was happening, what the motivation was behind it, and what was gonna happen next. For a high school in Miami to close because a building got hit in New York, it seems crazy but it just kind of shows how nobody knew what was going on and it took a couple days for people to really realize what was going on.

We didn’t have social media at that point. I think Facebook may have just started at Harvard at that point, I’m not really sure. Anyway, we didn’t have it at Ransom. There’s no Twitter or anything like that, so information just didn’t travel as quickly as it does now and nobody knew what was going on. Everybody was just confused and scared and people thought, you know, we’re going to war and in a sense we were, but obviously things turned out a lot different than I think anybody initially anticipated.

So you said that people felt like the Ransom community could be like the next target and people were scared and didn’t really know what to do. Were there any sort of security measures that were put in place by Ransom in order to ensure the safety of the community after the fact?

After the fact, no, because I think within a couple of days we realized that this was really kind of limited in scope, and we didn’t really think of terrorism at that point the way that we do now, where there’s all these lone-wolf attacks and shootings and things like that, that are just like a fact of life. At that point, this was literally the biggest and in many ways the only of its kind in terms of attacks. Once we kind of recognized it for what it was, you know, the immediate security concern kind of dissipated over the next few days. So, from what I remember, obviously, we got sent home that day — I don’t think a lot of schools got sent home. I remember friends from Gulliver may have gotten sent home but I know Gables and the public schools didn’t. But other than that initial closing the school for half of one day, I don’t think there was really anything done from a security perspective, at least at Ransom.

So you guys went back to school the next day? School wasn’t closed for a while?

I believe, well I remember for sure... Like I was saying, we had football and I think we ended up playing that Friday, or maybe they pushed it to Saturday, but I believe we were only closed for that one half of the day. I mean you guys probably know more than me at this point, from what I remember it was really just half of one day.

During 9/11 you were a senior, so you were obviously maturing into an adult and you, at this point, were able to have adult conversations. We were curious to know what the conversation with your family was like.

At first, in the days after, the weeks after, and really I think the months after, it was a unifying event for sure. The immediate reaction that everybody had was, “How could something like this happen? Why would anybody want to do this?” It was a lot of people’s first exposure to Islamic terrorism for sure, but really events in that part of the world. Obviously we had the initial Iraq War or the first Gulf War in 1991 but I think a lot of people weren’t really following what was going on in Saudi Arabia and Iraq in between 1991 when the Gulf War happened and 2001. Initially, everybody was unified. Obviously, everybody wanted... I think there was a lot of anger, a lot of people were scared, and a lot of people were just, you know... people were asking questions. Why did this happen? How did this happen? What do we do next?

So what we do every year on the anniversary of 9/11 is that we, the whole student body and faculty, go into the quad and we have a moment of silence. Was there anything similar to that that happened in the weeks following the attacks, anything that was organized, like a vigil or something to commemorate what had happened?

Oh yeah, I mean I think the rest of the year people were, really for the next five years, people were talking about 9/11. It was always on people’s minds. Obviously with, you know, what happened afterwards, the second Iraq War and Afghanistan obviously, we’re still dealing with those ramifications. But just on the ground at the time, with respect to football, we did end up playing that week but there was a huge moment of silence, you know, the flag was at half-mast. I think what we ended up doing, for almost every game the rest of the year, was, I think, both teams would come out to midfield and shake hands. You know, I don’t really know how that relates to the people who lost their lives in 9/11 but we were making these kind of grand displays of patriotism, of community, we’re all in this together. We might be going on with our day to day lives, that was kind of a big thing at that point — we can’t let the terrorists win, we have to continue to live our lives the way that we were doing, or as close as we can to what we were doing. But it was always, in every public event there was always some sort of moment of silence, always some sort of recognition, remembrance of the people who were killed.

Did you, or any of your peers or teachers, know anyone who had passed away in the attacks? Were there any personal connections to anyone in the attacks that you knew?

Nobody that passed away. My cousin was living in New York at the time and she could see it from her building. You know, people over the years who have been in similar situations. A guy that I work with now, he was in sales in New York City and one of the stops on his route was at the World Trade Center, and he just wasn’t on that route that day or he could have been there. And you hear a lot of the stuff like that. At the time I didn’t know anybody personally who died, though.

Was the rest of your senior year affected by the attacks? Similar to how now with the COVID-19 outbreak, the seniors’ senior year is being completely affected and cut short and they don’t really get the full experience. Did you feel at all like your senior year experience changed in any way or was affected by 9/11?

I think once it happened that’s kind of what everyone assumed was going to happen; everyone thought this was World War III and the immediate aftermath. I certainly thought that we weren’t going to play football again — “I could be drafted,” was kind of my first thought because I had just turned 18. But as it turned out, things were obviously different, but from a day-to-day perspective, we still all went to school, extracurricular activities by-and-large continued. Obviously traveling was a lot different, but we did, fortunately, get to have our senior year of high school and we weren’t disrupted too much. Like I said, the focus was on... people went out of their way to make sure that they continued with their lives. That was kind of the theme in the immediate aftermath. We can’t let the terrorists win, we can’t be scared out of doing all the things that make us, as Americans, American.

So, September is the month where seniors are doing their college applications and everything. For you personally, did 9/11 affect or change what you wanted for your college experience?

In terms of what school I went to, not really. But I knew that I wanted to be a history major wherever I ended up going to school, and I was a history major, but once I got there I started studying Middle Eastern history, things like that because this was our first exposure to that part of the world in a lot of ways, and it really shifted what subjects were taught and what people were interested in. I remember my senior thesis, whatever it was called, in college was about Lybia and Gaddafi, which was kind of a forerunner to that kind of terrorism in that part of the world. Also, I studied a lot of, I guess, war strategy and politics, we had classes like that and they were all focused on, you know, the way in which our defense apparatus has shifted its viewpoint from conflicts between states to conflicts between America and individual bad actors.

After college did what had happened on 9/11 affect what you wanted to do for a career or grad school? Had you planned on doing something when you were in high school, and then after everything that happened maybe you decided that you wanted to change so that you could do something related to 9/11?

Kind of. The same kind of answer. I ended up becoming a lawyer, which I was probably going to be doing anyways, but part of my practice now is I represent victims of crime, and people in my firm have actually been involved in the lawsuits after 9/11, and that sort of thing. So for instance, right now, I’m representing people who were victims of the shooting in the Ft. Lauderdale airport. And the work that I’m doing now is derivative of the type of work that the people in my field were doing coming out of September 11. So I think in a lot of ways it’s kind of shaped the practice area. A lot of the things that we look into when we do cases — you know, I’ve become friendly with a lot of the lawyers who were involved in sort of the aftermath of 9/11. You know, trying to hold Saudi Arabia accountable and things like that. In a sense, it didn’t really change my career trajectory but a lot of things... It’s omnipresent. 9/11 changed everything and that had certainly trickled down to my day to day life.