Dogs of War: Baghdad Bureau Mascot Shot

By Vladimir Lozinski, Bureau Chief, ABC News Baghdad Midnight on a dark, moonless night. Two shots ring out. (Yes, it really happened that way.) I was dozing while watching another of those crappy B-grade movies we have here in Baghdad. The phone rang with that ominous Nokia ring tone. I picked it up, expecting the worst. Faisal, our bureau manager, was distraught on the other end of the line. “Someone just shot the Fox, the office dog.” I raced downstairs to the garden. There he was. Laying on his side, bleeding like a stuck … dog, with the ABC staff and our friends from CNN around him. We checked the wounds. Two. An entry and an exit wound just below his back. Looks like a 9mm or possibly a 7.62,” said Caddy, our head of security. All of that expensive battlefield medical training suddenly kicked in. We cleaned the wound. Packed it with Betadine. Caddy handed me a compression bandage and we tied a knot that Florence Nightingale would have been proud of. We all filed down to the blast walls to check out the situation with the Iraqi security team that protects our perimeter. “It came from around there” said Abu Abdullah , the chief guard, waving into the dark empty lot behind the office. “We have to find out who did this” said Arwa Damon, our colleague and friend from CNN. Once again my highly tuned Hostile Environments training snapped in. “You want me to wander around at 1 a.m. in the dark looking for a dog assassin with a gun? Let’s do it the morning.” He is a complicated dog. After all, his surrogate parents, the correspondents and producers who have regularly rotated in and out of Baghdad over the past four years, are not exactly stable role models. “So who’s your daddy?” Fox was born in the chaos of the Iraq war. An orphan, at the age 3 months he wandered into our office, immediately installed himself under the newsdesk and became the bureau mascot since then. For awhile he took to racing up to strangers on our street and barking at them. We put that down to anger-release due to his deprived childhood. But what could we do? He was our Fox. Last year the shopkeeper down the road complained that he was driving away customers and we should do something about him. “I’ll do that the day we are charged the same price for ice cream and mineral water as the locals,” I answered. This morning he was resting in the hallway as usual, depressed but sore as I gave him his penicillin shot. Later in the day he managed to at least get up and play with his food and try to lick his wounds. I think Fox will make it. Read more blogs from Vladimir Lozinski