RETURN TO VIETNAM: WOMAN REUNITES WITH FAMILY SHE LEFT BEHIND

JACKSON -- The Communist rebels in Vietnam captured and killed Jacqueline Blaylock's father in 1945 when she was 2 and her name was Jeanne Jacqueline Nguyen Van Nghiem. When her mother disappeared four years later, the family knew she, too, had been taken by the Communists.

The four orphaned children were raised by their grandmother and an uncle. They were very poor. "The whole family had to sleep on one bamboo bed as small as a bunk bed," she says. "We had to lay sideways instead of lengthwise. We were packed just like `sardines' in a can."

Somehow they survived as a family in the middle of a war that was rending their country.

In 1969, Jacqueline was an interpreter and receptionist working in the U.S. Army headquarters in Long-Binh when she married U.S. Army Capt. Arthur Blaylock. She came to the United States with him that same year, just as the Vietnam War began turning against the South Vietnamese and Americans.

She was able to visit her family when Arthur was assigned to duty in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1971, but he was reassigned to Fort Knox, Ky., in 1974. Jacqueline did not imagine nearly 25 years would pass before she would see her family and homeland again.

Jacqueline returned to Vietnam Dec. 19. The 36 members of the family she left behind met her at the airport with roses and tears.

"It was a very emotional moment for me," says Jacqueline, who has lived in Jackson with Arthur since 1977.

"... I'm the outsider coming home.

Jacqueline was accompanied by her sister, Trang, who had immigrated to America in 1994. Their oldest sister and brother and their families who remained in Vietnam were not the sole reasons for the return.

Trang had had to leave her married children behind when she came to the U.S. Both sisters were concerned about the health of their 62-year-old oldest sister, Nga.

And Jacqueline had some respects to pay.

"My grandmother passed away, I wasn't there. My sister said when she was passing away she wouldn't close her eyes," Jacqueline said tearfully. "She was looking for me."

Visiting her grandmother's grave was one of Jacqueline's missions in Vietnam.

Seeing her siblings again was equally emotional.

"I left home 30 years ago," she said. "Not a single day don't I think about my sisters and brother."

The children of her oldest sister and her brother cried when she had trouble recognizing them after 30 years. "How can you not remember me?" they wailed.

Never before seen were her sister's and brother's grandchildren. Jacqueline, who used to operate a day care center in her home in Jackson, is a magnet for children.

Both her brother, Thanh, and sister, Nga, live just outside Saigon while a nephew has a house in the city. The family still struggles but not nearly as much as they did after Saigon fell.

The Blaylocks had just made arrangements to remove her family from Vietnam when the South Vietnam defenses finally yielded. Jacqueline didn't hear from them for five or six years. "It was the worst time of my life," she says.

Finally, the uncle who had raised her wrote to say everyone was OK. He had arranged to have a plane rescue the family when the Communists took over but Jacqueline's grandmother refused to go, and he would not go without her.

A formerly wealthy man who burned his worthless currency because it linked him to the Americans and marked him as a leader, her Uncle Nghiem join the French Army to help support the family. Jacqueline's grandmother was sold vegetables at the market.

Jacqueline's second sister, Trang, was married to a colonel in the Vietnamese Army. After the fall of Saigon, he was sent to Hanoi for more than 10 years to be "re-educated." She and her children were driven out of their house. They lived with her in-laws in a house with a dirt floor.

Trang and her husband moved to Southern California in 1994 through a program that allows former South Vietnamese Army officers and their families to immigrate to the U.S.

After the grandmother died in 1979, Uncle Nghiem reasserted his French citizenship and moved his family to France in 1984. Jacqueline visited him there twice before he died in 1997.

Over the years, the Blaylocks have sent money to the remaining family in Vietnam. Part helped her sister, Nga, fix the roof on her house and to put tile on the dirt floor. The renovations have helped but the conditions are still overcrowded.

Nga accused Jacqueline of being spoiled because she screamed when mice ran across her feet as she slept on the house's floor. The house has no refrigerator and no table for eating.

Jacqueline's nephew is the primary breadwinner. He manages one of the best restaurants in Saigon (which the North Vietnamese renamed Ho Chi Minh City but the residents still call Saigon), works from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. seven days a week and makes $100 a month.

"But they are happy as can be," Jacqueline said.

Vietnam is as beautiful as she'd remembered, Jacqueline said, and outside of the rusting Quonset huts at the airport there is little evidence of the former American presence.

Jacqueline and Trang returned to the U.S. Dec. 29.

Arthur didn't go with Jacqueline to Vietnam because she was too worried about his safety. He is a former captain in the 517th Engineer Intelligence Detachment in Saigon. Arthur, who spent a decade of his life in Southeast Asia, said he has no ill feelings toward Vietnam.

"They didn't attack us," he said. "We went there."

Arthur was assigned as an engineering consultant to the Army National Guard in Cape Girardeau in 1977. He retired as a lieutenant colonel in 1980 and became a real estate broker.

Since moving to Jackson, Jacqueline has taken nursing classes, run businesses and most recently has been helping special needs students at South Elementary School.

The Blaylocks, who have three grown children, want to sponsor the rest of the family out of Vietnam but Jacqueline refuses to choose between her sister and brother and their families. "Either you stay or go all together," she said.

She said she has prayed every day for God to help her find a way to get her family out of Vietnam and bring them to the U.S., "where the children can laugh and play without fear."

The Blaylocks' living room is filled with pearl-inlay art work from Vietnam. An American flag stands next to the couch.

"Now this country is my home," Jacqueline said. "There is no place I'd rather be."