When you get around to choosing your side in the civil war and take out the opposing soldiers, why can you not kill a last remaining soldier at their camp site? Are they essential? They just get downed and recover health but not killed. I hate that I can't kill the last guy, especially now that he is the only of his kind left.

unfortunately they are essential. It svcks man, I know.

The commanders of the Imperial/Stormcloak "secret" camps in every hold are marked as essential and for whatever reason that doesn't change even when the entire war is over and they're the only enemy soldiers left for you to kill.

If you are on PC there is a mod called Kill Them Generals that makes all of the camp commanders (except Rikke and Galmar) non-essential so you can kill them if you choose. Was at Skyrim Nexus when I got it, don't know if you can get it through Steam but I thought I saw it there as well.

If you can't mod your game the best you can do with those camps is kill everyone but the last guy and then beat him down to his knees and make your getaway fast enough that he loses track of you before he can get up and start attacking again. Having a follower can complicate this as they might want to stick around and finish a job that can't be finished.

See, I look at that in precisely the opposite way...
I just want to win the Civil War but without killing ANYONE on the opposite side.
(Impossible I know)
But your blood-lust is completely misplaced; they are after all your own brothers and sisters.
They are all honorable people and love Skyrim, and just want the best for it.
They simply disagree on what needs to be done and how to proceed...
Why would you desire the complete extirpation of your poor defeated countrymen?
Doesn't make sense.

Well, here's the thing... when the war is over, I typically don't go LOOKING for more enemy soldiers to kill. Problem is, they tend to be hostile when I run into them. Playing as a Stormcloak I stumbled across the Imperial camp in the Reach. I was actually looking for a dragon lair that was somewhere nearby and found them first. As it happened, the dragon I was after came swooping in and began circling over the general area. The Imperial archers started shooting at it.

At that moment I decided that Stormcloak vs. Empire was one thing, but People vs. Dragon was another. I made the decision to come out of hiding and go after the dragon myself. I was actually trying to lure it up a hill away from the camp when an arrow whizzed past my head. It was clearly not aimed at the dragon.

I turned around and found out that the entire Imperial camp was now attacking ME. Me, the person who was willing to put everything else aside and risk her own life to save them from the dragon who they no longer cared about because OMG A STORMCLOAK KILL HER!

After that, wiping out remaining enemy camps didn't bother me so much.

Please note: the fact that I was a Stormcloak being attacked by Imperials is irrelevant, I'm sure it would've been the same had it been a Stormcloak camp and I was playing Imperial. The point remains, I'm not gonna worry about sneaking around all over Skyrim to avoid the remnants of the enemy. Once the war IS over, the remaining soldiers on the losing side need to disarm and GO HOME otherwise they are still enemy combatants. They war is over and they could withdraw, in the case of the Legion, or put down their arms and go home, in the case of the Stormcloaks. But they don't, so they have chosen to remain as guerilla forces operating against the lawful government of Skyrim. Plus, they get hostile when they see me, and I'm not gonna go out of my way to hide from them when they are the trespassers.

The only way to be 100% sure someone never does something again is to kill them.

I just defeated the Stormcloaks on my most recent (current) playthrough.
But it's really funny, they don't attack me, they're actually nice to me when I encounter them...
However I don't try to enter their pathetic camps - even so, they won't attack me; they draw weapons and just glare at me if I'm coming too close.
I killed a dragon and they all came running over, saying they wouldn't have believed it if they hadn't seen it with their own eyes, etc. (just like a town guard).
Bottom line - go home.
Yes I agree they should all just GO HOME!
Heheh...

I agree. It's over, go home to your families.

That's similar to what I say in video games after I've killed a boss or a regional boss-like mob and the henchmen are still attacking: "I just killed your boss. Take the rest of the day off.".

You actually don't need a mod. You can just get there refl id and then set them as non essential. I have all of them on a piece of paper so when I find them and want to kill them I can. Like one I know is 84552 so you type setessential 84552 0 > enter and then they are killable.

I finished the civil war and for the most part the Storm Cloaks no longer attack me. Like Gryphon said, they warn me off if I approach their camps. I am wondering if part of that is because of other quests I have done. Like, I hate the Thalmor and I helped that lady in Whiterun free her son from the Thalmor, so maybe I built up some faction with them in spite of being an Imperial through and through. I killed tons of them in the Civil War but they don't seem to have me marked as an enemy.

There's an Imperial camp somewhere along the coast on a high cliff. I tried Fus'ing the general into a crag below so that he would become trapped but it wouldn't work. Dude would free-fall about a thousand feet down to the beach and then spend 2-3 minutes running all the way back up to the camp for another flying lesson. Persistent bastards.

I went even further than this, and removed the flag from all of the 'Essential' people. I kept the Khajiit caravans and a few other select people as Protected (only the player can kill them), for various reasons. Some of said essentials also had an 'Invulnerable' tag (Brynjolf, for example), which went as well.

Of course, the camp leaders should not have been 'Essential' to begin with, since during a war one of the primary targets is the enemy's local commander.

I hate their essential-ness, too - it is probably just a programming oversight - so I use the console to render them non-essential, as indicated above, and then I kill them ('natch).

Update: the unofficial patch must have made them non-essential; since I have had it installed, they are all killable.

Unless it's completely intentional because they're all supposed to be there, still in place, for some DLC/expansion/rest of the story type dealio. You know, one that requires the losing side in the war to still have commanders running camps where regular soldiers can respawn in order to continue on with the aftermath of whatever happened in your particular version of the CW questline, or perhaps even to become temporary allies in the face of some threat so overwhelming that only by joining forces can the free peoples of Tamriel hope to survive.

Just a thought.