The recent stampede for private jets out of Dubai suggests there’s little stomach for war in the contemporary lap of luxury. But elsewhere, this hasn’t always been an option.
With American diplomacy once again on a bomb-and-kill setting, it’s a fitting time to revisit their most memorable military failure, Vietnam, from the comfort of the Hotel Metropole in Hanoi. Founded at the start of the 20th century during French imperialist rule, the Metropole survived the 1972 carpet-bombing raids of what locals call the “American war”, and now thrives in a country operating under what its regime calls a policy of economically enlightened communism.
Situated in the French Quarter between the Hoan Kiem Lake and Hanoi Opera House, it seems to have been plucked from a Parisian film set. Its four-storey wedding cake exterior hides a Christmas-red interior, scattered with the typical signs of opulence – cigar and whiskey bars, a patisserie, gift shops, sumptuous dining rooms and corridors of characterful rooms and suites.
The most popular is dedicated to Graham Greene, who stayed during the final years of French colonial rule and is reported to have written some of The Quiet American here. Scour the internet, and you can find letters from him handwritten on Metropole notepaper.
The hotel has hosted its share of other famous names – Charlie Chaplin, Stephen Hawking and Angelina Jolie among them – and hosted the fruitless 2019 summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un. But while acknowledging this star power, the Metropole also proudly displays its involvement in the country’s military history.
Ho Chi Minh used it for meetings, while in 1972 American political dissidents and counter-culture icons Joan Baez and Jane Fonda both stayed here while the city was under attack from waves of B-52s. And unlike its peers, the Metropole also has a 50-year-old bomb shelter, recently rediscovered and restored.
From a distance, you might mistake its entrance for a concierge desk. On closer inspection, you discover that the bamboo panelling guards a flight of thin concrete steps that head down into the ground. Here you are given a bamboo pith helmet, not just for a photo opportunity but also to prevent you from cracking your skull on a razor-edged, low concrete beam which you must duck beneath to enter.
Twice a day, you’ll see a small group of guests and one of the hotel’s Path of History tour guides, Mr Tung Nguyen or Mrs Huyen Han, as they head down to give their subterranean history lesson. It starts at a glass cabinet in the hotel reception.
Among its treasures are unexploded ordnance, a battered but signed Baez album and a copy of a 1967 Life magazine with a cover image of Vietnamese people popping into solo bomb shelters in front of the hotel. The photograph is both peculiar and chilling, and once you see the accompanying images of the street-level havoc caused by the US Air Force, it’s hard not to wonder how many people were actually buried alive beneath collapsing buildings.
The cabinet is an unusual feature for a luxury hotel reception – the Hotel Palácio near Lisbon, for instance, doesn’t celebrate the fact that it was a hotbed of allied and axis spies during the second world war. But here in Hanoi, they want you to know what they say is the true story of the American war, and not the Hollywood misrepresentation of it.
The steps down to the shelter itself present a somewhat ominous descent, and there’s an immediate transition between the comfort and luxury of the hotel and what lies beneath. A bomb shelter is a bomb shelter regardless of who seeks safety in it. There are no soft furnishings, chairs or ornate shutters, no afternoon tea, no international breakfasts, or members’ club-style business lounges. Just incredibly thick walls and ceilings of concrete, very little air and an intensely grim reminder of the terrors of air raids.
It has two interconnected rooms, both about the width of a communal shower. One still has its original bank vault door, and in the other, you can see the remains of a rudimentary air pump. I can’t help but wish it was still working, and as Tung Nguyen tells the story of the shelter’s original use and rediscovery during a 2011 refit of the Hotel’s Bamboo Lounge above, I find myself heading back towards the open door simply to breathe better.
As the rest of us wait in silence, the guide begins to play a recording of Baez singing during her wartime visit, accompanied by the sound of a city under attack, muffled explosions providing a sinister backing track. Names etched into the walls during the shelter’s original use can still be found, and as the haunting song proceeds and the bombs thump away, you start to get a feeling of what it must be like to endure the hell of a sustained aerial attack.
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It’s over 50 years since the war ended, and above ground Vietnam is thriving economically, boasting GDP growth of 8.02% in 2025. For the young, as elsewhere, brands and photo opportunities seem to mean everything.
After leaving the bomb shelter, look outside the hotel and you’ll see young Vietnamese wannabe influencers posing for photographs, knowing that geographical proximity to establishments like The Metropole momentarily gives them status. Where once there were flash fires, there are now flash emojis.
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