We consider a single-mode radiation field initially in a displaced squeezed thermal state. The weak interaction of such a field with a heat bath of arbitrary temperature is shown to preserve the Gaussian form of the characteristic function. Accordingly, the study of the time development of the density operator reduces to our previous description [P. Marian and T. A. Marian, preceding paper, Phys. Rev. A 47, 4474 (1993)] of the initial quantum state. As examples, photon statistics and squeezing properties of the damped field are analyzed. Based on the close relation between field dissipation and photon detection, we derive simple analytic formulas for the counting distribution and its factorial moments. Nonclassical features of a displaced squeezed thermal state, such as oscillations of the photon-number distribution, survive in the counting process, provided that the quantum efficiency of the detector is high enough.